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Using Treehouse, I Built a Website from Scratch

When you live in the Gig City, it feels like you can throw a stick around here and find someone who's building an app, working for a tech startup or has the next big social media idea. And while I love the energy and am happy to live and work in a forward thinking city, sometimes I felt like those around me were speaking a second language. So, I decided to try my hand at learning that language: coding.

Asking around, I heard great things about an online learning community called Treehouse. It is a fee based service; however, Chattanooga's great public library has a limited number of subscriptions. I was able to use one. The nice thing is once signed up for Treehouse through the library, I was able to work at my own pace and from anywhere I had an internet connection and a computer.

There are numerous tracks within Treehouse. So even if you are lucky enough to have some coding ability, you are not required to start at ground zero. I completed two tracks: digital literacy (6.5 hours) and how to make a website (8 hours). You could skip the digital literacy and go straight to making a website. However, I learned so much in the digital literacy track: why things work the way they do, why things are called what they are and you do some simple code work here as well.

As I was building the site, I struggled on what the website content should actually be. I decided to create a site that lists freelance services that I could provide. I've done this sporadically in the past and having a dedicated online space for this seemed like a good idea. Not trying to leave my day job, but it never hurts to have your skills and abilities listed for others who might need them.

Is the website perfect? Nope. There's still some work I'd like to do on it, but overall I'm very happy with the final product: a clean and simple responsive site. While I don't have experience with other learn to code providers to compare Treehouse to, it is geared towards business development (i.e. developing your skill set to then market those skills to be income generating) and it provides mobile first design instruction. This allows you to build a great mobile website first, and then make small additions to adjust your site for larger devices (i.e tablets, laptops and desktop computers).

The biggest victory is really understanding the language. While I cannot picture myself working solely as a developer at any point in my professional career, it's that I can more clearly understand what happens behind the scenes of the websites I manage from a content perspective and can speak the same language as those I work with or meet through my professional networks. I did fix something on the back end of my work website today that I normally would have had to ask our offsite website team to fix. Win!! It's just another skill set that I'm happy to have.

Ready to check out the site? Here you go: www.amyhdonahue.com

A simple screenshot of some of the site. 



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