The great thing about the challenges in this chapter (unlike all the others in this book) is that you don’t need to know how to code at all to complete them. For this challenge I want you meet someone new. Talk to the person next to you on the train, or in a bar, or at a football match. And when the inevitable question ‘what do you do?’ is asked, respond ‘I am a web developer’. Obviously you’ll need to be a little bit careful that the person you’re speaking to isn’t best friends with your boss, but the odds of that are fairly low. The goal of this challenge is primarily to make you feel like a web developer, and to start having the sorts of conversations web developers do. You’ll almost certainly know much more about the web than the person you’re speaking to, and if you get rumbled you can always say that you still have a ‘day job’ .Choosing A Niche As I’ve mentioned, I was a teacher before I became a web developer. This means I’ve got a lot of insight into how schools work, how teachers think and what makes students tick. I’ve also got a lot of contacts in local schools and universities. This gives me a big advantage over other web developers when pitching for jobs at educational institutions, and several of my highest-paying gigs have come from these areas.
If you have experience or expertise in a particular area, I’d recommend thinking about how you can brand yourself to match these skills with your web development work. Increasingly, developers are required to do much more than just build a website to a specification. You need to be able to suggest how a website or app will benefit an organisation, how it should work and even train people on how to use the site.
Build An Online Reputation As a web developer you’re going to need an online rep. Some of you may already have 5,000 Twitter followers and a blog with a million hits a month, but for the rest of us, now is a great time to get started.Very simply, at this stage you need to do two things - buy a domain name for yourself and join Twitter. There are obviously a lot of other things you can do to build your reputation, and we’ll examine some of them later on in the book, but this will do for now.Buying A Domain Name Your first domain name will be your own online space. Unlike your Twitter account, Facebook or even your wordpress.com blog, you will completely own your content, you can post what you like and will be able to export it at any time. This can be critical down the line - other providers may go bust, start charging high fees or ban How to earn $10,000 while learning to code10you for some reason, but your domain will always be yours to do with as you like. Whenever someone writes about you, or you build a website for them, ask them to link to your main site. This will likely bring in a trickle of traffic, but will definitely boost your results in Google and the other search engines.
I won’t go into choosing a domain name in great detail (there are a few links in the bibliography at the end of this chapter for this). Suffice to say, try to go for a .com if possible, and a domain name that features your name prominently. If you have a particular username that you use widely on the web, using that instead can work well, making that your personal ‘brand’. Alternatively, you can build your name into a pun, such as automattic.com by Mat Mullenweg, the founder of Wordpress. Don’t spend ages over this decision - the content of your site is much more important than your domain name.
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