Outsourcing...? 🥱Chile'...PLEASE!
Sorry...not meaning to sound hostile or flippant about the whole matter of #freelancing. I UNDERSTAND (implicitly) that for any Entrepreneur, the context is the equation of Time with Money. As simple a thought as it gets from my perspective. But what I don't get is why deny yourself access to skills that would allow you to maximize, and retain, creative control over the presentation of enterprise-related branding (as important as your bottom line)?
Both the banner image above and the article header banner are personal creations and one of the many skills I've garnered over the last two decades. I will NEVER be a victim of the "hurry up and wait" syndrome that happens to be a retardation factor in the development of online for-profit projects. You'd think the exorbitant costs associated with trying to get at-least decent programmer help would ensure some type of quality control.
As someone active in the online coding communities ecosystem, I can tell you that it does not 🤣. I'm always surprised to know that, even as amazing as some of the individual members can be, even THEY have questions they need help with and bring them to these communities for smackdown. But, in the future, if you get untimely delays with your developer, chalk it up to this.
Which is why I'm glad I began the journey into #codingwithjoy early...about 1978 or so. Similar to the simultaneous ubiquity of the propagation of the cell phone, it seemed like my household had ascended to the Star Trek level. Every guest was taken aback with the sight of it and always wanted to know what it was.
"A...a com...whut?", was the beginning of the conversation which ended as if I told them to their face they were dumb as a bag of hammers. The idea that the machine was created as a circumstance of helping Nuclear war survivors in radiation-free underground facilities share files with others in the same circumstance. No, they couldn't be expected to wrap their heads around that prospect. While being told this by a ten-year old.
Exactly the scenario that locked my young mind in orbit, it was no surprise that I intuitively knew that there would be other languages developed that would help the fledgling Personal Computer become a household fixture, eventual employer, and planetary presence. And the reason I'm still pretty comfortable with DOS (disc operating system, or Command-Line as it was introduced to me as back in the days). Without that foundation, I would be in a Hellish predicament trying to navigate the setup of a dynamic website while ensuring the script retained no security holes or other potential flaws that would help an attacker win at attempting to cop off with my site databases.
But, this woeful resistance to learning even the simplest of the language combos (HTML5/CSS3) is a bit of a mystery to me as I watch countless thousands of individuals scream in tormented agony that they have to play the headless-chicken customer victim roulette. You'd think they'd get pissed off enough to actually start teaching themselves, but these are the same people that complain about having to pay more than $10 for something that they refuse to educate themselves on. The next few images are examples of what you can do once you learn;
As examples of the range of advertising module coding in my domain re-invention, these were all codebases I'd stumbled onto in the past and stashed for future usage. How much do you think a complete advertising-related application outfitted with secure database application access (enabled by PHP Data Objects - for those in the know, it's called PDO), as well as a completely responsively-skinned (Bootstrap-based) framework to satisfy the modern device range browser requirements? By my humble estimations, I'd be out-of-pocket about $7,500 counting the current developer hours pricing index.
And that's the "market-will-bear" value. Microjobbing estimates can be vastly cost-reductive, but the amount of work needed to sift for suitable candidates (whether you post wanted gigs or do background research) subtracts from time needed for profitable execution and search engine propagation of the website. I guess the BEST thing about being proficient in coding is that I can cook up just about anything I want in a decent enough time and EXACTLY as I want it; no arguing back and forth about a feature I want installed only to be told that it's impossible in the scope of the project when the POS, lazy-ass wanna-dev never bothered to nail down their basics and is too busy standing on the back of cut-and-paste code examples from one of a myriad of coder help sites online with no regard for anything other than a fat payday.
It means I never have to worry about the safety of my intellectual property sourcing, or any of a thousand other issues inherent in the process of outsourcing. OBVIOUSLY, my motivation, in the initial dive into the discipline, was one of ghetto-born economic necessity. "Tryna make a dolla' outta fi'teen cents...". I was set on being the captain of the ship. Now, in retrospect, it was the best move I could have ever made even if basing it solely on the career choice. As a whatever-you-are in the context of the Working Week, you're facing an inconvenient, soon-to-be truth.
As soon as THIS decade, if you're not even possessed of even basic mastery of HTML5/CSS3, you'll be on the level of the functionally-illiterate. Come on, people! They're starting to teach coding to children now - IN SCHOOLS. Keep not wanting to get your hands dirty with this and you'll find yourself getting pawned by a boss thirty years your junior, making ten times the cash as they built the tech framework powering the company providing you work😖. You don't need to be a genius...just start today💥