Understanding web development and writing code is only one piece to the web puzzle! Codecademy is a great tool to further understanding of how certain web languages work and how we can use the language to create our vision on our web pages. The latest Codecademy lesson on jQuery was probably the easiest lesson to date and it really furthered my understanding of the library and how to operate it. Following the Codecademy lesson, I took to GoDaddy to choose a domain name that would shape the future of my family’s business!

My folks are self-employed and they run a house cleaning business in Northern Virginia. As a small business marketing consultant, I had been putting off creating their website until I took this class. My folks have yet to file as an LLC or any other business structure so there is no official name, this gave me flexibility in choosing a domain name. I did some keyword research using Google Keyword Research Tool to see some search volume numbers. This helped me determine that I needed to include the term “cleaning” in my domain name choice. This keyword will assist my SEO efforts to compete against Molly Maid and their ilk.

A well-functioning site that has a great user interface and is structured properly is important for online visibility along with your domain name. Having a keyword that is highly searched upon within your domain name helps a good amount on the search engine results pages (SERP). A bad user interface and broken links can lead to poor page ranks from Google, which in turn would lead to bad placement on the SERP. Which leads to less visibility and ultimately less revenue coming from the online space. A well thought out domain name in this sense is essential to your online visibility. This is not to say a unique name or a play on words will lead to bad results on the SERPs because there are other ways to optimize your web page for your keywords. However, in an industry that is already crowded, you can and should take every chance made available to you to increase your online visibility.

Also, don’t forget to claim your Facebook page, Twitter handle, Linkedin, Google+ and others! You’ll be sure to need them sooner or later to own the entire SERP for your branded key terms.

Pop Quiz: When I wrote “Search Engine Results Page (SERP)” above, what would be the JavaScript equivalent of attributing meaning to an acronym?

This week’s Codecademy and mid-term assignments were easier to understand than last week’s. While completing this weeks Codecademy assignments, I actually felt like I understood the logic and got the hang of the strings covered in the assignment. This is exciting as last week I was ready to quit web-development.

Not only was this week’s assignment comprehensible, but it was also valuable. Creating and adding buttons, and having the button complete an action are functions that I definitely want to include on my site. As for the fade in and fade out functions, those were fun to learn, but I am not sure that I will be including them on my site, at least not without the hide and show feature. Ideally, what I want to include on my site are images which transition on their own. Is this possible with WordPress?

The mid-term assignment of purchasing a domain and a hosting space was easy to complete and a lot of fun. Now I just have to start developing my site which I thought would be easy, but I am finding it difficult because I want it to be perfect whatever that means. To get past designers block my plans are to create a high-level outline of my site on paper. Once I finalize the draft, I will start developing my site on WordPress. My goal is to keep my site simple, yet modern.

There are so many things to consider when creating a site that it can be somewhat overwhelming, especially since I am just learning about HTML, jQuery and CSS, and not to mention web-sites are public. For now, I know that I want my site to have a home page, a link to register for newsletters, and membership, contact us information, the ability to order products, and a place for uploading videos, such as testimonials and/or video clips, and most importantly, I want my sites to be accessible via smartphones – iPhones, Galaxy, etc…

This week was a complete transformation for me in the world of Codecademy. I think I understood jQuery for the most part, and not just how to get through to the next page, but also the actual concept of why it’s used. The only thing that worries me a little bit is that there were times when the page said my code was successful but it wasn’t actually doing what it was supposed to do. Boxes that were supposed to vanish would just sit there. Whenever that happened I made sure to go back and figure out the correct way to do the code, but I’m still a little confused as to why it allowed me to move to the next page.

I’m not exactly sure when/if I’ll apply jQuery to the page we’re creating for class. I like that I understand jQuery (or at least I think I do) but the assignments that we did in class didn’t really get me excited to add to my page. Also, from a portfolio standpoint, I feel like simple is better, but maybe as the semester goes on I’ll change my mind.

At my job, only one person codes and he doesn’t know jQuery, so I’m not sure if that means that it’s not a necessity or if we’re just behind the times over there. Regardless, I would like to continue to practice with it to make sure I have it down because I think it does some really cool things. I’m not sure why it was so much easier for me to grasp, but I had such a more enjoyable week with jQuery than I did with JavaScript. Also, I really appreciate Codecademy for filling in the JavaScript for us so we could focus only on jQuery. Had it not been set up that way you would all be reading a far less enjoyable blog post from me.

Maybe it was the fact that there were about a third as many exercises as we usually do, or that I’ve learned how to quickly see what I’m doing wrong on message boards, or maybe the instructions are clearer, but I found jQuery to be much easier than traditional JavaScript. Although the class lesson seemed confusing, with the libraries and some of the fancier code that I didn’t understand at first. I feel like I have a much better grasp of jQuery, although I’m realizing that I’m going to have to keep coding to prevent forgetting everything I recently learned.

In one exercise I realized I had to use nth child, but completely forgot how to format it. I thought I could use ol-nthchild(3), when it should have been li: nth-child(3). Simple formatting like that is easy to forget in just two weeks, and I’m realizing that I’m not as fluent as I once was. If I’m going to remain fluent in programming, I’m going to have to find a way to practice while I’m not working on something.

As for setting up my domain name and hosting, it was a little more challenging than I thought it would be. In the end, I’m glad I went with bluehost for my hosting, because after some small troubles logging in because of site maintenance, I was able to easily install my WordPress blog by following a few simple instructions. I was surprised by a phone call from bluehost, which was fairly personal and asked me about my site and gave me tips for improving it, along with making sure that I didn’t have any problems. (Most importantly, they told me that I could cancel at any time and get a full refund.  For such great customer service, I might not pay anything at all for hosting in the end.) If you haven’t found hosting yet, I would definitely recommend bluehost.

This week I really started to notice a trend of merely following instructions. I set up the web page by following the instructions in the link, and got to the link by following the instructions in the e-mail. And although I may have understood part of what I did, I’m sure the bulk of it was lost on me. I actually think I even purchased something on GoDaddy.com that I didn’t need to. For example, why is it that I created my domain with GoDaddy and then had to pay extra to move my domain to GoDaddy? Or was that just the DNS that I had to move over? I may have been “bamboozled.” The other thing I don’t understand is why I have to go through GoDaddy to create my own domain using WordPress? Doesn’t WordPress have an option where you can create and use your own domain?

In Codecademy I found that one of the assignments wouldn’t accept my answer, despite it being correct (from what I could tell, anyway). It was the jQuery assignment that required me to make an object fadeTo when I hovered over it. Codecademy consistently told me the “opacity” had not been set to “1,” even though it had. In fact, in that part all you had to do was copy and paste mostly. I skipped it, and in the next portion it worked fine; the same exact code. Problems like this really lower the user’s confidence in the lessons, and make it difficult for someone unfamiliar with code to troubleshoot.

Despite all the problems, I still find it interesting that computer code can be used through servers to create such interactive webpages. I also have a newfound respect for people who have the painstaking job of keeping sites not only up and running, but also functioning the way the pages should. I am sure, once a developer begins to add databases and more interactivity in a webpage, it becomes increasingly difficult to predict how users will interact with the page and difficult to anticipate problems that may arise as a result.

I think I’m starting to get the hang of this jQuery thing. Last week felt like I had jumped into the deep end of a swimming pool after taking a single lesson on land. This week, I found a noodle to float on. jQuery seems a lot more straightforward – but I think I would feel more comfortable if I had a list of the most common commands or terms jQuery uses (fadeOut, slideToggle, etc.). How do programmers know if jQuery can do something on its own or if they have to write a whole new function for it? Obviously I’m not building anything on my own right now, but I would like to have a broad view of what the language is capable of so I can start envisioning what I want my future site to do (right now, I’m thinking it will be a personal portfolio website). Right now, I kind of feel like I’m still just obeying simple instructions from the Codecademy lesson, not testing to see if I actually know anything.

Last week, Greg half-jokingly suggested that we compare our weekly assignments to dancing – one of my favorite sports – in our analysis posts. I thought, “Why would coding ever remind me of dancing?!” Of course, I spoke (thought?) too soon. Yesterday, my girlfriend surprised me with tickets to see Anything Goes at the Kennedy Center. The first act ends in a show-stopping tap dance number (I LOVE MUSICALS), and it occurred to me, as a former not-so-great tap dancer, that tap dancing is kind of like coding.

There are really only four or five sounds you can make with tap shoes, but the way you put them together can result in infinite steps and rhythms. Javascript has only a few basic commands, but combined in different ways produces all kinds of cool effects. Also, if you mess up one little part of a step, you’re kind of screwed for the rest of the dance, because it’s hard to jump back in at the right time. A wrong tap that stands out from the group makes the whole ensemble sound messy. One little coding mistake – a misplaced parentheses or errant semicolon – can prevent an entire webpage function from happening.

Hopefully I’ll end up a better coder than I ever was a tap dancer.

After struggling through JavaScript last week, learning jQuery was a breath of fresh air. I won’t pretend that parts of it didn’t still confuse and challenge me (or that this section of Codecademy was glitch-free), but at the end of the day it made far more sense to me than last week’s lessons. I also really enjoyed being able to look at the final product of each lesson and feel like I understood something that even just last week felt incredibly overwhelming.

Despite how little time actually purchasing a domain name on GoDaddy took, I found that to be one of this week’s more difficult tasks for me. This was not because I struggle with making purchases online, in fact years of avid online shopping have adequately prepared me for the task. Rather this was a direct result of my being a highly indecisive person. So, convincing myself (for long enough to actually make the purchase) that the name I had chosen was what I, in fact, wanted to stick with was a surprisingly daunting task. This could have been avoided had I chosen to go with my name and make a portfolio page but I realized after our first class that this project presented an interesting opportunity to hone in on an interest, rather than focus in on myself.

In trying to expand my jQuery vocabulary this week, I came across an interesting jQuery tag line: “write less, do more.” Despite this not being a new concept in this class, something about it stood out to me. In fact since day one, the readings and the homework have been reiterating that if our code is repeating itself or is overly complicated, there is probably a better way to write it. Perhaps it was the way the tag line was laid out but the first thing that popped into my mind after reading it was Paul Rudd teaching Jason Segel how to surf in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. There is a fine balance between doing too much, trying to do less and actually not doing anything. Jason and Paul seemed to find it so I knew that if I set my mind to it while learning to code, I would get there as well.

I’m happy to report that this week was much easier for me compared to last week. I breezed through the two jQuery lessons, which was a good self-esteem booster because I actually felt like I knew what I was doing. I’m not sure if jQuery is easier than JavaScript, or if completing the JavaScript tutorials last week helped me better understand the jQuery lessons. Part of me wishes we would have started out with jQuery because it seems a lot simpler to wrap your head around, and then go into learning the basic concepts of JavaScript. But who knows what the best approach is? I think you can argue it both ways.

In last [Tuesday] night’s class, I thought it was helpful that Greg walked us through the take-home assignment of adding captions to our galleries. I also appreciated that he assured us that the objective here is not to memorize the code, but to grasp the overall concepts. This morning, one of my colleagues said something about JavaScript that really resonated with me. He said, “I’ve never really written any JavaScript, but I sure do manipulate it.” What he was getting at was that he knows enough about the overall concepts that he can edit or change existing JavaScript code to make it do what he wants. Looking back, this seems to have been the goal of the gallery assignment.

I’m excited that we are now in the process of setting up our hosting site for our final projects. (But who knew there were so many steps involved!?) I wanted to mention one thing about purchasing your domain from GoDaddy.com. Last night I created an account and added my chosen domain to my “online cart,” but I didn’t actually purchase it. This morning when I woke up I had an email from GoDaddy saying that if I complete my order by July 2, I can use this special promo code to get 30 percent off. So… in case you haven’t purchased your domain yet, this is one way to save on the cost!