With plenty of career choices in the world, choosing what to do for living is not an easy decision. A healthy career comes out of finding the intersection of market demand and what you love to do. Being in the software industry for around fourteen years, and ten of them spent in web development, my career choice of web developer has come out of a funnel, starting as a desktop application developer and refining my knowledge to web development as the potential market started to emerge. But web development has changed dramatically last ten years. The possibilities of web applications often surpass those of desktop applications in market reach and sales perspectives. I will list here 5 reasons you should be a web developer.

1. You Can Work Independently

Being a good team player is an essential skill required to be a part of any organization, but when it comes to starting a private business or wanting to earn some extra money in addition to your full time job, being able to work alone is equally important and a huge benefit. As a web developer, you can create web applications, web sites, themes, and many more digital products which you can easily monetize. You may sell gigs on sites such as Fiver, or create WordPress themes and earn some extra money by working an hour or two in the afternoons at your home.

2. You Do Not Have a Big Startup Cost

Developing web applications does not require huge computing resources. The startup cost is as cheap as having a moderate computer and an internet connection. Many of the software tools which are used to develop web applications are free of charge or cost less than $100. Nowadays, even the hosting providers have lowered prices quite a bit, and you can easily find good hosting for your web site(s) for ~$5 per month.

3. You Can Sell Your Work Online

Being a web developer, you do not need any shipping or packaging of your products. You simply push your code to the hosting server and run it there. You may also easily do remote consulting work or create web sites and sell them in different marketplaces. Envato is one of the companies that provides different marketplaces for different digital products, one of them being WordPress themes: themeforest.net.

4. You May Develop Mobile Applications With Web Development Skills

Web development has evolved over the years, and with that, the support to browsers as well. In current days, you may easily pack a web application as a mobile application and publish it in Apple AppStore, Google PlayStore, or any other mobile app market. The user interfaces may often be very similar to native applications and may create a full featured mobile app with plain web development skills, thus allowing yourself access to a huge market and business opportunities.

5. You Have Plenty of Tools and Frameworks to Suit Your Work Style

As a web developer, you will have plenty of tools and frameworks which make your job easy in many different ways. Of course this is highly impacted by the platform you choose, but I would confidently say that, all major web development platforms and languages have good communities with good support and plenty of tools available to develop web applications and web sites. This will make your jump start to web development easier and time to market quite short.

If you have not yet decided what kind of developer you want to be, here are five reasons to be a web developer. Web developers have plenty of opportunities in front of them, which suit the needs of different kinds of persons. You may be an entrepreneur or a full time professional developer, web development has a lot to offer to you.