The world is an insanely busy place these days, but if one thing’s for sure, it’s also a place where it’s easier than ever to get a website up and running. No story demonstrates this more effectively than the recent news about a good Samaritan who taught a homeless man to program.
A Simple Choice
The good Samaritan named Patrick McConologue drove up to a homeless man over the summer and told him that he could choose between taking $100, or learning how to program. Patrick offered to buy him books and a laptop, and give him programming lessons for one hour a day for 2 months. The homeless man chose the latter. The homeless man, Leo Grand, is now known as the “Journeyman Hacker.” Leo released an app that he programmed from the streets, getting it done after just 4 weeks of learning. So this brings up the important question, if he can do it, why can’t you?
Finding the Time
It only takes an hour or day or so to learn just about any new skill, and programming is no exception. You can also learn how to build websites, create mobile apps, or learn the basics of web design this way. It really doesn’t take as much time and effort as you might think. The difficult part is getting started. This is almost always the most difficult part of undertaking any major enterprise. If you don’t think you have the time to do it, then you won’t. But if you care about it enough, you can almost always find an hour a day to get it done.
Finding Resources
One major objection to this idea is that you might be worried that you won’t be able to find resources to help you learn. This would be surprising, considering just how many resources are available online these days. The trick is to find resources that are either free or have a small cost associated with them. There are a lot more free apps and resources out there than you might think. For example, one great resource would be YouTube. You can watch desktop video captures of people actually going through the process of programming, or creating a website, or doing design. Many times you can follow along with the videos, which is a lot easier than you might think.
Choose Wisely
Of course, the most important thing is to choose something that you have a lot of interest in. If you just try to force yourself to do something, like programming, because you think you should, then you probably won’t get very far. It’s always important to do what you love first-and-foremost. But once you figure out what that is, you need to go after it with everything you’ve got, and do your best to not be distracted by anything that might get in your way.
Start by finding the right resources, the right tutorial, the right programming language, and above all else, finding enough time to devote to your quest. After all, if homeless people living on the street can figure it out, given all of the intense challenges they will face throughout their lives, then you can do it, too!
Overall, there a lot of different ways to make all of this happen. One example is that you can learn how to build your own website with 1&1. This service really makes it a lot easier to figure out all the skills you need to get through the process quickly and make sure that you learn everything you need to know.
Guest author Marianne Ross is an online marketing enthusiast who spends most of her time online and loves to share her thoughts and articles on various channels in topics related to business, social media, marketing and SEO. If you have any question to ask from her, feel free to leave a comment below.
