Frugal Babe

My husband does all the website design for our insurance agency.  He’s very good at it, and everything he knows has been self taught over the last four years since he set up the website.  He’s constantly tweaking it and adding to it - we get comments all the time on how user friendly and easy to navigate it is.  I know nothing about web design, so I’m especially grateful for him! 

Until now, he’s done everything using HTML, but a few months ago, he decided that he wanted to be able to do more dynamic web design, and he started looking into PHP and MySQL.  There’s a class at the local college that he could take, but it would have been $800 plus books.  Instead, he decided to tackle it on his own.  He found a class online that cost $20.  Every week he has a reading assignment, and a program to write as homework, then he submits his work and gets feedback from an online teacher.  He’s on week 5, and he’s the only person still doing the classwork.

In addition to the class, he got an e-book and several library books, and he’s been spending about 30 hours a week teaching himself PHP.  He’s been applying what he’s learned to our website, and the results are awesome.  Very proud of him.

Since we’re self-employed, he doesn’t have to get a certificate from a college showing that he’s learned the language.  He just has to be able to use it.  So far we’ve spent $52 on this project, and he’s learned huge amounts.  I am confident that he’ll end up with just as much knowledge as he would have if we had shelled out $800 for a structured class.  I’m sure we’ll find better uses for the other $748!