The YouTube Web Designers Who Helped Me Build Boofkay.com
I didn’t go to school for web design.
A good part of what I know about building Boofkay.com came from doing what a lot of people do when they decide they’re going to figure something out themselves:
I went to YouTube.
Then I watched. Paused. Tried something. Screwed something up. Went back ten minutes in the video. Tried it again. And slowly, the website started coming together.
Along the way, there were three web designers and YouTube instructors who became especially important to my learning process: Ferdy, Rino de Boer and Darrel Wilson.
The easiest way for me to describe my journey with them is:
Ferdy helped me learn how to build it.
Rino helped me learn how to design it properly.
Darrel helped me learn how to operate it.
But I want to make something clear right from the start.
That’s my learning journey. It’s not a description of the limits of what any of these guys can teach.
All three are more than capable of taking you much further than the particular things I learned from them. I happened to discover their videos at different stages of building Boofkay, and each one helped me solve the problems I was dealing with at that point.
This isn’t a ranking either.
It’s a thank-you.
Ferdy Got Me Started
When I first started working with Elementor, Ferdy was the guy who helped me get moving.
There is a lot about building a website that is exciting when you’re looking at the finished product.
Actually learning how every setting, container, widget, margin, breakpoint and option works?
Not always quite as exciting.
Ferdy has a personality that makes that kind of material easier to sit through and, more importantly, easier to absorb.
He’s funny. He’s honest. He’s a character. And he has a way of explaining things without making you feel like you need to already understand web design before the lesson begins.
What I really liked was the simplicity of his approach.
He shows you where to go.
He shows you what to click.
He shows you what happens.
Then you do it yourself.
When you’re starting from scratch, that matters.
There is a big difference between somebody explaining what Elementor can do and somebody walking you through the exact steps of actually doing it.
Ferdy’s videos gave me enough confidence with Elementor to stop staring at the screen wondering what everything did and start building Boofkay.com.
And once you start building, you start learning.
Where To Find Ferdy
Website: Ferdy.com
YouTube: Ferdy.com | WordPress Tutorials | Ferdy Korpershoek
Videos That Helped Me
These are some of the Ferdy tutorials and resources I personally used along the way:
Then You Think You Know What You're Doing
This is where Rino de Boer entered my education.
By this point, I knew enough about Elementor to be dangerous.
I could build containers. Move things around. Change sizes. Adjust margins. Make something look good on my computer.
Then you start looking at the same website on a laptop, tablet and phone and realize:
Oh. There is a lot more going on here.
Rino helped me understand that good responsive web design isn’t just dragging things around until they look right.
There is structure behind it.
There is mathematics behind it.
Widths relate to other widths. Containers relate to their parents. Spacing needs a system. Typography needs to scale. Breakpoints matter. The decisions you make on desktop affect what happens everywhere else.
His teaching style feels very precise and engineered.
And I mean that as a compliment.
Where I might look at a section and think, Move this over a little bit, Rino helps you understand why it should be where it is in the first place.
His videos on containers and responsive design especially helped change the way I thought about building pages.
I wasn’t just arranging things anymore.
I was starting to understand the system underneath them.
For me, Rino came along at exactly the right stage:
After you think you kinda know what you’re doing, you’re ready for Rino.
Where To Find Rino
Website: Livingwithpixels.com
YouTube: Rino de Boer
Videos That Helped Me
These are some of the Rino tutorials that helped me better understand Elementor, containers, responsive design and the system behind a page:
Darrel Wilson Helped Me Deal With Everything Else
Then there is Darrel Wilson.
Darrel has a way of making the whole process look incredibly easy.
And that’s useful because once you’ve built the website, you discover that building the website was only part of building the website.
Now you’ve got:
Rank Math.
SEO.
Google Analytics.
Google Search Console.
Image optimization.
Video optimization.
Video hosting.
Plugins.
Themes.
Performance.
Blog layouts.
Settings buried inside other settings that you didn’t even know existed until something stopped working.
Darrel’s videos helped me navigate a lot of that.
His tutorials were especially helpful when I was setting up the Blocksy blog on Boofkay.com and learning how to properly configure Rank Math.
And some of those videos I didn’t watch once.
I watched them over and over.
That’s something I’ve learned about teaching yourself this stuff on YouTube:
Don’t watch a tutorial like you’re watching television.
Put the video on one side of the screen and your website on the other.
Go slow.
Watch the step.
Pause.
Do the step yourself.
Go back if you have to.
Then continue.
There is so much involved in operating a modern website that you’re probably not going to remember everything after watching somebody explain it once.
Darrel made a lot of the tedious technical work much easier to navigate, and he has the websites and experience to back up what he’s teaching.
Top notch.
Where To Find Darrel
Website: DarrelWilson.com
YouTube: Darrel Wilson
Videos That Helped Me
These are two Darrel tutorials that became especially useful as I started working on SEO and figuring out everything that happens after the website itself has been built:
Three Teachers. Three Different Points In My Journey.
Looking back, I didn’t intentionally set out to learn from these three people in this order.
It just happened that way.
Ferdy got me comfortable enough with Elementor to start building.
Rino made me realize there was a much deeper system behind good responsive design.
Darrel helped me tackle many of the tools, settings and technical jobs required to actually run the thing.
And again, that’s not to say Ferdy can’t teach advanced design, Rino can’t teach you how to build from scratch, or Darrel can’t teach design.
They can.
It’s simply the role each one happened to play in my education while building Boofkay.com.
That’s one of the reasons I wanted to include them in What Makes Boofkay Run.
Because when somebody looks at a finished website, they see the finished website.
They don’t see the hundreds of searches.
The tutorials.
The rewinding.
The experiments.
The mistakes.
The settings you changed three times before figuring out what they actually did.
Or the people on the other side of a YouTube video who took the time to explain it.
If You're Trying To Learn Web Design Yourself
My advice is pretty simple.
Find somebody whose teaching style makes sense to you.
Open their video.
Open your website.
Put them side by side.
And follow along.
Don’t worry about becoming a web designer in a weekend.
Learn one thing.
Then another.
Then another.
Eventually those little pieces start working together.
Kind of like gears.
And before you know it, you’ve built something.
Ferdy, Rino de Boer and Darrel Wilson all helped me build mine.
Thank you, gentlemen.
