Continuing Education

Every field of work that I'm aware of has some sort of continuing education. Nurses continue to learn about new medications and techniques, accountants keep up on new tax laws, and mechanics keep up with new engine components. Web development isn't any different than these other careers.

Technology continues to change, and so does the way you program for it. One thing that I'm doing now is making sites so that business owners can do their own updates. This was something I barely heard of when I started working on sites, but now it's common practice. In order to do this, I, and a lot of web developers, use a program called Wordpress.

Wordpress was originally designed as a blogging platform, but is now behind more than 74.6 million web sites according to one source. In another month or two, I will likely be having a site redesign project that will be using this platform. That's not unusual, but the site designer and I will be using an addition, or plugin, that allows for streamlined control over the site's design. This plugin is what is new to me.

Therefore, I have been learning how to use it with two other sites I have been working on this month. So far, I'm liking the opportunities it provides in terms of site layout. However, it's taking time to figure out what goes where to make everything work. I learned yesterday that it also doesn't use a certain programming language I'm familiar with for design aspects. Yesterday was spent looking through the changes and finding a program (such as Microsoft Word for text) that can read the code and let me work with it.

Learning new things can be a fun challenge and I'm thankful I have the opportunity to learn before I need to be working quickly. I can see this being something I'll use quite a bit, at least until another replacement comes. That is what has been going on in the quad life.