Becoming a Web Developer

  My start into web development began nine months ago with a problem that I faced at work. My co-workers and I needed a way to communicate with each other about issues we were having with the coffee machines we repair for a large local vending company. Many of the service call problems that we encounter on the job had no preset solution, and  often it was by trial and error that we would find the answer. In order to document and share the information among ourselves we agreed that the best solution would be a blog site where we could upload videos that we had been recording on our cell phones.


  Because  I had been publishing articles on a blog for almost a year, I was selected to head up the project. After a couple of weeks of research I began to figure out that this project could do much more for us as a team if we made a website where the customers could go to resolve simple issues with some of the more complex single brew systems. If the user could take action by following short online tutorials like those found on Youtube, then they would be able to get the machine up and running quickly and not have to wait the several hours that it often takes for one of our team members to arrive. Based on the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words, the first thing that I did was build an instruction sheet in Photoshop that walked the customer through a simple machine reset. The shop manager had the sheet printed and laminated and distributed to a customer we were visiting two to three times a week to reset their machines .

We witnessed an immediate drop off in calls, a reduction of close to seventy percent over the next three months. Based on the success of the simple reset sheet. I pushed ahead to layout the website in Photoshop and this is what I came up with.

At this stage I started learning HTML with Treehouse and next thing I know its six months later. I'm still actively learning with Team Treehouse and applying what  I learn to my Coffeetech project as well as a couple of other small projects that I have started.