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Bootstrapping IT – Learn To Do IT Yourself Or Outsource IT

So you’ve got a great tech-startup idea, you’re motivated, energetic, have time on your hands, some funds for investing and absolutely no knowledge of coding what so ever. So you have a few hurdles to jump through, but nothing a concoction of time and sincere dedication won’t overcome.

 

 

Hurdles of IT

The challenges facing startups are mainly with finding the right people (programmers) and ultimately the limited availability of funds. Although finding the right people may leave deep a hole in your pocket, you must understand that even those with all the supposed “right” credentials will have to learn new things to bring your ideas to life.

 

The IT world is a constantly evolving environment where 80% of the time a successful implementation will come from the thoughtful choice of technology rather then the background knowledge of programming.

 

 

From the mouth of a Programmer…

As a programmer myself, each time I work on a new product, I’ve had to make thorough consultations with “Dr. Google” to learn new coding languages, new standards and syntax to be able to achieve the end product. More importantly, each and every time I had to ask myself how much classroom knowledge am I using here? (Quite honestly a substantially small amount).

Should You Learn IT Yourself Or Outsource it?

A background in IT gives you the foundation to adapt more quickly to programming languages. However, if funds are a limiting factor and your idea is not overly complicated, such as setting a up a website; I recommend you get back on the learning horse, as it is something very achievable within a couple months and familiarizing yourself with technology in the 21st century can never be a bad thing.

 

 

For Web Startups, I recommend learning the following to Bootstrap your IT:

 

  • HTML and CSS code: this will deal with the visual and layout aspects of your site
  • When it comes to design, looking at other sites is an excellent place for inspiration
  • You’ll need to know Database basics possibly using MySQL to store/access data
  • To give your site greater functionality and access to your databases you will need to understand server side scripting and client side scripting: Possibly look through PHP, and JavaScript
  • And the last thing you’ll need is a little knowledge with graphics, in order to give your site its unique personality

Se habla Programming?

It is true that learning programming is like learning a foreign language, but the great thing about today, is the availability of hundreds of tools to make your life simpler and development more feasible. Powerful software such as Adobe Dreamweaver, lets you design a website completely through a visual interface, while it generates the HTML and CSS for you. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides complete documentation for all their standards, (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL), with working examples designed specifically to teach newcomers.

 

 

 

In addition, you almost never have to write code from scratch with the emergence of all the open source code libraries, which have spawned all over the net. Like everything else, getting the hang of programming will be challenging at first, but if you fight through your initial frustrations you’ll be able to produce amazing things. The most important part is to have the right mindset and understand that the answer to 99% of the problems you will encounter is simply a good search away.

 

Photo Credits

FreeDigitalPhotos.net / FreeDigitalPhotos.net / FreeDigitalPhotos.net / W3.org

 

 

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