Hiring a web design agency is just one of the paths business owners can take when they want to create a website and start conquering the digital market. If you don't want to hire a professional web designer, you can also do this work by yourself. Learning web design online is not an easy task, but it is not impossible either.
Today, a website is the number one digital marketing tool for most companies. Many business owners build their whole company around one website or a mobile app and earn millions of dollars. Facebook, Twitter, and Google are the best examples of this practice, and because of their success, many beginner entrepreneurs want to promote their business operation on the digital market.
For this type of promotion, they need a robust website, which looks appealing and offers easy navigation and high conversion rates. If you are an entrepreneur, you know that the lack of funds is the biggest problem, in the first phases of company development. That is why many business owners want to build their website from scratch by themselves.
If you don't have enough funds to pay professional web developers and designers, you can check our article on the easiest way to creating a website. By using content management systems like WordPress, you will take care of the complicated back-end development processes. With the use of themes, WYSIWYG editors, page builders and CSS, you will design individual pages and posts and make them attractive to your audience.
Still, even for these tasks, you will need at least a moderate web design knowledge. In this article, we will share some of the best sources for learning web design online. From programming editors to websites that offer video courses and tutorials, we will try to cover as much ground as possible. Since the quality of various courses and platforms often depends on their price, we will include both free and premium learning sources.
W3Schools – most popular source for web design online (free)
The most popular web design online tutorial is easy to use, colorful and welcoming. You have probably bumped into it while searching for some web design terms. The tutorial is very popular, and it found its way to the first Google Search page for a wide variety of web design and development search terms.
Easy-to-understand tutorials will give you first lessons in HTML and CSS. W3Schools also offers tutorials for JavaScript and more demanding back-end languages, like PHP and Ruby. After reading the tutorial, you can check your knowledge on code simulator, or you can play with markup live of the W3Schools website.
MIT OCW – great starting point for a novice web designer (free)
The MIT’s Open Course Ware is the platform run by the MIT university. It allows you to listen to video lectures, filmed in the MIT classrooms and read the materials and literature the MIT students have access to. If you weren't able to enroll at the MIT or some other fancy college, this platform is your shortcut to this university's huge knowledge base.
If you want to start using the MIT OCW, choosing the right course will be one of the hardest parts of your learning process. The core computer science courses usually start from Python. So, for learning more about website design, you will need to find specialized courses that deal with developing and designing websites, apps, and other online platforms.
Udemy – listen to private lectures provided by web design agency professionals (paid)
Udemy is similar to MIT OCW, but it is a paid platform that offers straight-to-the-point lectures that cover one issue, field or programming language. You can start with the WordPress course and then continue learning about HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Although most comprehensive Udemy courses cost around $200, the website is regularly organizing sales and giving out discounts, when you can purchase most of the courses for $15 or $20. When searching for a course, pay attention to the reputation of the teacher and the references other students have left. Most teachers offer help and consultations through social media and messaging apps.
Google Code University – learn web design online, from Google engineers (free)
Google's Code University is a platform developed by one of the biggest companies in the world, which helps you to build websites and web and mobile apps and assign them to a broad range of functionalities and features.
If you want to learn web design, you should check out the course called "HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from the Ground Up." It will give you the basics of website building and these three languages in the form of video lessons, recorded by Google developers.
Tutorials Point – best tutorials’ base every web designer should use (free)
Although Tutorials Point doesn’t offer too many video lectures and interactive courses, it is still the biggest tutorial base you can find online. There you will learn anything from HTML and CSS, to creating MySQL databases, or using Python and Ruby to form the website’s back-end architecture.
Lynda – popular platform that offers webdesign video lectures (paid)
Lynda is a very old platform. It was built in the dawn of the internet, in 1995. Since then they are producing tutorials, books, and documentaries, but they have become trendy recently for the excellent video lectures on web design and many other IT fields. Lynda is a paid service, but since it is one of the most competent training platforms, its video courses are well worth the price. The website also offers free trials and basic and premium access for $19.99 and $29.99 per month.
Webdesign is a fast-growing field, and if you want to become a web designer, these platforms will help you to overcome the first steps. Later on, you will switch to more comprehensive tutorials and create websites by yourself. On the other hand, if you are an entrepreneur, who doesn't have time to for reading and learning, your best bet would be to contact a reliable web design agency and get your website fully equipped by the experienced professionals.
