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General Discussion

Kristoffer A-L
Kristoffer A-L
5,863 Points
Posted by Kristoffer A-L
Kristoffer A-L
5,863 Points

What skills do I need to build a website for my friend?

Hi,

I'm about to build a website for my friend, as a way for her to show and sell her products as a jewelry designer. I know basic CSS, HTML and JavaScript, so I'm quite confident in making the design "come true".

But my skills are too limited for this project, and I'm up for learning. What the site would need, apart from looking good, is:

  • a secure system for selecting and paying for products.
  • a way for my friend to update the products and some instances on the page herself, without my assistance. Is this a CMS? Is WordPress the way to go here?
  • and I guess some other things, that I haven't thought about yet.

Do you have any recommendations on courses I could do here on Treehouse? I'm totally down for learning back-end, if it would benefit this project, but not really sure where to start. I'd appreciate the help!

Best regards, Kris

1 Answer

Liam Clarke
Liam Clarke
19,938 Points
Liam Clarke
Liam Clarke
19,938 Points

Hi Kris

Sounds like you need to first pick a Content Management system (CMS), a CMS is software used for creating, editing, organising, and publishing content. One I'm sure you've heard of is WordPress but theres 100s out there, some even tailored to e-Business like this project you are doing, like Magento.

e-Commerce sites are no easy task so you will need to do a lot of code, back-end and front-end to get everything going. There are corners you can cut by using a CMS like WordPress as there's pretty much a plugin for everything nowadays however i wouldn't recommend solely relying on plugins, they will clog up your site, make it slow and make it insecure.

My recommendation would be to pick a CMS you feel the most comfortable with, for me it would be WordPress but that's because I've developed with it a lot. However as a beginner, WordPress have a ton of support as well as having fully documented code with the WordPress Codex where you can pretty much find anything you want to do with WordPress.

Once you picked a CMS, start learning everything about it, WordPress uses PHP so if you pick WordPress, you need PHP.

I wrote a answer not long ago talking about a similar thing so you can find some more info here

Hope this helps

Kristoffer A-L
Kristoffer A-L
5,863 Points
Kristoffer A-L
Kristoffer A-L
5,863 Points

Thank you so much for your answer, Liam Clarke , I really appreciate it. I'll dig into Wordpress and PHP!