But I digress. Understanding HTML and CSS will let you build better templates in WordPress, since you’ll be able to customize things better. It’s at the core of all web skills so I would definitely put it on my list of things to learn.

WordPress is a great place to start and you can even create a business solely on it, but like any piece of software, it can get limiting. We’ve got a ton of excellent WordPress content, so maybe you can continue to master it and then move on to other things.

It’s true that nowadays, schools teach courses on online media, but there’s still a lot of us who came from that background that haven’t made the transition…There are tools like Adobe Muse that will help those who are still visual designers to create websites, but in the long run, those people should learn some of the new techniques…that’s why I recommend starting with WordPress…it gets people going quickly and doesn’t require coding skills.

I left the print industry just as they were getting rid of film imagesetters. Glad you’re making a transition…we’re here to help.

WordPress is awesome. You can start and really build a whole business just on mastering WordPress sites. It’s not for everything though…so if you want to move on from that, it’s a great idea to dig into JavaScript and then PHP and MySQL.

You don’t need any PHP knowledge to install or use it…It’s only required if you want to build plug-ins, create or modify templates. That’s why it’s good to start by building first and move slowly towards development.

When I first decided to learn web development, I taped a piece of paper with the above quote to my laptop. It is the same idea as “eating an elephant one bite at a time” and is crucial to not being overwhelmed when learning this complex skill. Lynda.com helps make this one step at a time approach easier since you can finish a large course one video(bite) at a time.

I very much agree with your advice Ray. I am happy to see that I have followed a similar path to what you suggest, and encourage others to follow your advice. I would also say, if you have the time, do not be afraid to explore other technologies like Ruby On Rails instead of PHP or Drupal instead of WordPress. Eventually you will gravitate towards the technologies you are the most comfortable with and find your niche.

I also wonder if it might not be harder now to help someone transition nowadays: during the same time (ten or fifteen years ago) most print designers who used computers had to use coding systems on systems that didn’t have a WYSIWYG interface – you keyed a formatting code to specify a font treatment, such as bold text, then keyed it again to return to roman text – so it was pretty easy for them to learn the “code” to do the same online.

It must be exponentially more difficult to train up someone who has always used a visual layout tool and never saw or even thought about the code behind the formatting.