Marketing is becoming more and more technical. If you need to set up a website, you need to learn WordPress, and in some cases develop some of the more complicated features of a site using a programming language like PHP and a database such as MySQL. If you need to create interesting social features that go beyond simple social bookmarking buttons, you need to learn how to program those features.
But you can’t take a whole class just to create a feature which you need to quickly add to your site and forget about it. You need something that can help you get up to speed quickly. And you are not alone. Despite developing code for many years, I myself get stuck on new stickly issues that come up daily. These tend to be small technical tweaks that can take hours to figure out if you have never dealt with it before. In this article I will share a few of my go-to resources to get programming help to either learn a new technology, or get past something pesky and time consuming.
WordPress Help
WordPress is supposed to be easy and simple. And for the publishing power it gives us, it is relatively simple. But nevertheless, we can all recall certain times where we just could not find the setting we needed, or how to make a certain configuration changes. Those moments tend to be very frustrating and tend to waste quite a bit of our time. To help you get past those moments, WordPress Answers can be an amazing resource. The site is a sister site of StackOverflow, and there are many WordPress experts on it who provide amazing help.
StackOverflow For Regular Programming Questions
For technical issues that have to do with programming or the database, there is nothing better than StackOverflow. StackOverflow has been an absolute godsend from Joel Spolsky who created it. The site has an amazing community of brilliant developers who answer various programming questions quickly and for free.
So when you get stuck with any programming or database issues that are more involved than just WordPress, StackOverflow is the site you should go to for help with your technical issues.
The only caveat with StackOverflow is that you should make sure that the questions you ask are clear and follow the general StackOverflow guidelines for asking questions. If you do not follow the rules of StackOverflow, you may get the wrath of the site administrators who take the question quality on StackOverflow very seriously.
Feeling Geeky And Want To Learn More About Some Tech Topics?
Once you begin gaining some expertise in any of the technologies you work with, some of the frustrations will go away and you might start to enjoy working with those technologies. If you want to get deeper into particular technologies, one site I use is Geek Talk which has videos and articles by well known developers and CTOs from popular startups, explaining how they accomplished various technical challenges in their companies by using
different open source technologies.
GeekTalk (G33kTalk to be exact. How do you like that for a geeky name?) is not a well known site, but it has great content because the founders focus on tech events in San Francisco and New York to cover tech talks which would otherwise be very difficult to find. The site has content that other sites don’t often have. The site mostly focuses on open source technology which is perfect for learning because there are such passionate communities around these technologies.
Hacker News
Hacker News is one place on the web where marketers, entrepreneurs and developers meet in one place. And the collection of articles reflect that. People post about a variety of topics ranging from political issues touching technology, marketing, and interesting articles about working with popular technologies.
Have a resource of your own that you swear by? Please share it in the comments below. And if you’re at the end of your rope and need help with your website and marketing, please contact The Social Media Hat.
Image courtesy of CollegeDegrees360, Flickr.