It can be hard to practice your skills as a programmer, especially when you’re a beginner. There are many websites that offer you exercises, easy or hard, to practice your skills and improve yourself.

However, the best way to improve your knowledge in programming languages is through practices that resemble real-life projects. Through these kinds of projects, you can basically get your hands dirty and benefit greatly for future real projects and any problems you might face then.

I present to you today a few ideas for projects that can help you test your knowledge and expand it. These projects have the elements that can be a part of most websites.

Below you will find the ideas explained briefly with a few pointers on what features you can include. You can include as many features as you want or change the ideas to whatever you desire. I’m just giving you a place to start.

NOTE: These website ideas are for beginners whose skills are basic in HTML/CSS/Javascript/PHP. They are ordered from easiest to the more challenging ones. If you are looking to advance your skills, I advise you to follow them in order.

Movies

This is probably one of the most classical project ideas. Simply put, the website offers the user a list of movies they can watch.

The features of the website are basic enough. You can browse all movies available, search through movies, or browse them by category. If you are logged in, you can add a comment or rate the movie. Also, you can offer news about the movies or the actors. Any feature you can think of is possible.

What you should focus on: The main focus is on the admin’s dashboard. The admin is the person that adds, deletes, or edits movies, news, users or comments. If this is your first time developing a project with an admin’s dashboard, then that should be your main focus.

Online bookstore

This is somewhat similar to the previous project. Create a website that shows the user a list of available books they can buy.

If you don’t want to implement the payment part, you don’t have to. You can simulate the buying experience and represent it with a simple email sent to the user indicating what items they have bought.

What you should focus on: Many of the features of this website are similar to the ones in the previous project. So, try to implement them differently while providing a seamless user experience. If you haven’t used AJAX before or you’re not very good at it, I advise you to learn how to use it in this website. Also, try to focus on security. Learn more about form validations, securing data before inserting them into the database, and other ways to make sure your website is secure.

Tests Generator

This website can offer many features for users. The main feature is that it gives a user the ability to create a multiple choice test and view people’s answers or scores.

You can add several features to this website. For example, a user that creates a test can make it public or private (accessed by a list of people specified by the user). Another example is that a user can view charts of the questions most answered correctly or least answered correctly. There are so many others as well.

What you should focus on: This project has more logic than the previous two. Focus in this one on how to implement the main and additional features in the most efficient ways. Also, make sure to implement authorization (which user can see what).

Top Ten Lists

This is a website that I personally worked on to improve my knowledge of React, but you can create it with the basic and fundamental programming languages.

Simply, this website lets users create top ten lists about any topic they want. Additional features are users interacting with each other’s lists, voting on each other’s lists, messaging each other, among a lot of other features.

What you should focus on: A feature you can learn how to implement is giving users the ability to register or login with their social media accounts. You can try Google, Facebook, or Twitter. Another thing you can focus on is learning Bootstrap or jQuery or both. Both of them are very important and can make your projects (and life) easier.

Budget Tracker

A very useful website. The main point of this website is to help users manage their expenses and incomes.

Some features that can be added to the website are calculating profits, informing the user what are their biggest expenses and how they can save up. You can also generate reports for the user.

What you should focus on: on this website, focus on making things simple. This website is about helping the user, and the best way you can help them is making the website easy to use. Whether it’s the design or how a user can do a simple or big operation, make it as simple as possible.

School Management

A very required project by schools and institutes. It’s mostly required as a software, but some need it as a website (run locally, mostly) as well.

This website gives users the ability to store, edit and view students and teachers’ information. The school can also manage their finances and their curriculum plans, among other features.

An institute once asked me to add charts that analyze incomes, expenses, number of registered users compared with other users, etc… You can implement that as well.

What you should focus on: this website’s core focus is on data. A school will focus mainly on how to view the data and deal with it quickly and efficiently. Another important part is creating backup. Find a way to give the school the ability to create a backup of their data.

Tip: an easy way to generate charts is through Google’s chart web service.

Conclusion

This was a list of a few website ideas you can use to increase your knowledge and skills. There are so many more ideas you can think of to create, but this is merely to give you a head start.

Your opinion: what other ideas can beginners use to create websites and improve their skills?