- January 20, 2021
Artur Konopka: “Your website is your brand”
Reading Time: 5 minutesGraduate of the number one web development boot-camp in the world, Le Wagon and now a Junior Full-Stack Ruby on Rails developer, Artur Konopka, told Neolo how were his beginnings and how he works nowadays. Read the article to get to know how he programmes today and what tips you should follow to improve your online presence.
Please tell us what you do and how were your beginnings as a web developer.
At the moment I am working full time at one of London’s leading law firms as a data analyst and as a freelance web dev in my spare time.
How did I start? I always wanted to be a programmer; it’s just sometimes you need a little push from someone. My wife encouraged me to follow my dream and she helped me start this career. I tried to become a self-taught web dev; however, I was always making up excuses, that’s how I decided to join Le Wagon Bootcamp and it was 100% worth it.
What can you tell us about your experience in the Boot Camp?
I think it was a great idea joining Le Wagon and I don’t regret it. Obviously, you have to do all the work yourself and you can say “well but you can also learn everything without such a big investment” – well I say that’s true and everyone has their own methods but the amount of the materials and support which you will get is not replaceable. Stuff is really supportive and explanation of each stage of web development (starting from the brain storming, designing and finally coding) was just excellent. So, it’s definitely worth investing into it if you don’t have time to become a self-thought dev or you were not studying programming at the university.
How is the job of full stack developer?
I think being a full stack web dev it’s the best option, you can link both of the worlds:
– front-end – where you can finally see results of your hard work and think “ok, that looks cool, I actually like it” – it’s even better getting that feedback from your clients or reviewers
– back end – where you can focus on the more technical side of coding which I think I enjoy more but sometimes it’s also good to see some front-end results.
Overall, as per job I think that’s the best option for me, I can just grab my laptop, open up my terminal, browser, text editor and start coding without any worries (of course there are deadlines, but who likes to talk about them).
Which programming languages do you usually use?
On a daily basis I use Ruby for the back-end and HTML, JS, SCSS for front end.
I am also learning React with Redux. In the near future I want to learn Python.
Do you nowadays work for projects?
At the moment I work on a couple of my personal projects which I plan to launch around the 3rd quarter of this year or beginning of next year. At my workplace we are working on a couple of interesting projects but unfortunately, I cannot disclose any details due to the signed NDA.
What do you think about WordPress?
Honestly, I am not a big fan of CMS software. WordPress is by far the most popular one. It’s quite easy to learn, free to use and edit (obviously you have to pay for some services like hosting or premium themes), has a lot of great plugins (like LiveChat) which can save you quite a lot of setup or coding. Overall, it’s a great software with great community and even more potential than it already shows.
What would you say are the main benefits of having a website?
I think that the main factor is that now your website is your brand. You can expand through the Internet enormously (look at Amazon). Nowadays online presence is inevitable also for small businesses. I would even say it’s a must in the current era.
Another really important factor is credibility – let’s say I want to buy some product and I cannot find the manufacturer’s website or any reviews about it online. What do I do? I put it back on the shelf and look for another one. Same applies to the service providers. I think it’s a great tool for credibility improvement.
I cannot stress how important online presence is. It gives you a growth opportunity which you’re not able to achieve in the old traditional way anymore.
How would you say SEO amplifies the advantages of having a website?
I’ll answer in a bit similar way as to the question above. When we use by far the most popular search engine (Google) how many links from the list are we going to open? I would say max 5 top ones unless someone has time and patience to check them all. SEO amplifies advantages of having a website and your chances of being noticed online thousands more times. If you’re getting noticed, you bring clients. If you bring clients, you bring profit and so on. And again, same reason as above – credibility – users usually trust search engines and if I am able to find your website as one of the top results then I will trust you more than someone who’s website won’t even appear on the first page of results found.
What CMS would you recommend? How has your experience been?
I don’t really use CMS but if I could use one and recommend it, I think it would be Webflow. It’s really good for web designers, when you don’t want to spend most of your day coding but want to focus more on design. I feel like there is more design freedom in there, then with other site builders like Squarespace. They also have a really cool option of Team account which allows you to collaborate with your team and invite into the project anyone you want, whether they have free or paid subscription.
Please mention 3 main tools you use as a web developer.
That would be my fingers, keyboard, coffee… just joking.
I use VS Code as a text editor. In the beginning I was a bit sceptical towards it but a number of extensions changed my mind quickly. I used to use Atom but swapped originally because of the integration of VS Code with Ubuntu on Windows OS.
Main framework used by me is Ruby on Rails, which I think is the one of the easiest if not the easiest out there to learn. I heard a lot of opinions that RoR is not very robust but I do not agree with it. You can do a lot of powerful things with it (look at GitHub or Airbnb).
For web design and prototyping I use Figma and Affinity Designer. Figma is one of the leading UI design software where Affinity Designer is a good alternative to Adobe Illustrator. Essentially it has nearly all the same tools as the AI. However, the most important thing is that Designer comes with life-time licence which is much more affordable than AI.
If you have to give one tip about SEO, what would it be?
Link to other websites relevant to your content.
Don’t think that linking to other websites with similar content to yours takes people off your page. This is a really important part of smart search engine optimization. If you won’t link to others, why do expect them to link to you? But remember to build on quality not on quantity. Better insert one or two links to really reliable sources than link to hundreds of poor ones.
And about having a website?
Always remember that you are creating websites for your visitors (potential clients) not for yourself.
You have to put their needs and wants first when you create the content. They are visiting your website with a certain goal and you have to help them achieve that goal as soon as possible making sure that they will have positive user experience after their visit.
If you want to know how to build your own website, check out our Website Builder.
