Hi

 

Just wondering if someone could give me some advice on the best way to learn web-design. Are you college/university educated or self-taught?

 

Cheers

 

Michelle

You'll hear different opinions from different learners. With that in mind, I'll always say go self-taught.

 

You can learn at a much faster rate, in your own time and study the aspects of design you want to study, as opposed to studying what a teacher wants you to study.

 

You'll want to learn HTML5 first, then CSS3, then it gets tricky with JavaScript. You could take a detour from web coding after CSS3 and start learning web design stuff, like Photoshop and Illustrator. Either way, having a solid grounding of all of those is the best way to go.

 

Take a look at http://www.codecademy.com/ and http://www.w3schools.com.

Thanks for that. I already have photoshop under my belt, so part of the way there.

 

I know a graphic designer who also builds professional websites, he self-taught. I just wondered if this is the way to go, pretty much sounds like it.

 

Is there any books you could advise to help me along the way?

Is there any books you could advise to help me along the way?

 

I can't, I've never used a book to learn to code or design. Well, I did buy a JavaScript book once, then returned it a few days later because it was 1,000 pages and would've bored me to an early grave faster than my sky-high cholesterol. There is a point in there - if you want to explore every single bone of a coding language's skeleton and learn exactly what they all do, why they're used, where they derived from etc, then buy a book; if you just want to learn to code and know what things do, learn online.

I am self taught, for html i learned that from just playing about/googling when things would break as for CSS i learned alot of it from dreamweaver's code view via trial and error. As for PHP i went to my local library and rented out a book that i read in my spare lessons while i was in 6th form

Hello. I found this site really good for learning www.1stoptutorials.com He goes through everything like html css and coding a psd template. All the tutorials are in videos too.

College just shows you possible technologies and opportunities etc. You have to choose what you like and master it on your own

Brilliant, thank you all for your advise.

Hi

 

Just wondering if someone could give me some advice on the best way to learn web-design. Are you college/university educated or self-taught?

 

Cheers

 

Michelle

 

Self-taught, started when I was around 14 - went to college, left after 6 months because I knew what I wanted to do, be a website developer and there was a web development apprenticeship open, I applied and got it.

 

Got my apprenticeship qualification and now I'm in University, and doing work experience wherever possible. University is just the same as studying on your own, only you get a briefing of assignments to create and pay £9,000 a year... aha.

 

Go for a degree, get work experience and build up your portfolio. That way you're ahead of the majority of website developers who come out of University, because they tend to have no work experience or an online presence from what I've witnessed.

 

Read as many books as possible, as it teaches you a more efficient way of coding, as well as areas of a language that you might find useful, especially O'Reilly books, read up on:

 

Web Designer:

• UX Design (Anything by Jakob Nielsen)
• HTML, CSS, Javascript (O'Reilly Books, codeacademy, W3Fools (for the basics) )
• Photoshop / Fireworks (clicky)

Web Developer:

• Server-side Programming ( PHP, Ruby, ASP ) ( O'Reilly Books, codeacademy, W3Fools )
• HTML, CSS, Javascript (O'Reilly Books, codeacademy, W3Fools (for the basics) )

Don't go straight for learning them all at once, it'll be quite overwhelming. It depends what route you want to go down.

Edited August 1, 201313 yr by Yakindo

Hi,

 

I agree with the posts here. I have taken a route via The Open University, though reviews of web development modules state that students should have good knowledge of JavaScript and PHP. I have just taken that route so that I can grasp core concepts and ensure I learn the best practices. I am just using the module to build a portfolio, a simple website followed by a complicated project and then a project of Olympics 2012 project. The only benefit of this is that I would be learning best practices though there are websites that do tend to teach a lot of web designing pretty much free along with tutorials of web development on youtube which are in various languages to enhance learning. Everything you need is given in Yakindo's post and of others.

 

Good luck and happy learning

Thought I'd add in here - I signed up for Treehouse, their screencast tutorials are excellent and cover all the bases described in this thread.

There not free, but I don't mind spending a little for some quality education.

This may seem like a bit of a cheat, but why not test the water with a code free system first - see if you have the design skills, can find the clients etc. It's certainly one way of instantly becoming a web designer without going through the lengthy process of learning to code. Just a thought!

Glad I found this post, I had a similar question and there looks to be some invaluable information on here....thanks guys!!

I am self taught, for html i learned that from just playing about/googling when things would break as for CSS i learned alot of it from dreamweaver's code view via trial and error. As for PHP i went to my local library and rented out a book that i read in my spare lessons while i was in 6th form

This is pretty much how I grasped HTML & CSS. As for JavaScript, PHP & MySQL I read everything I could get my hands on and any video tutorials online.

Thanks for that. I already have photoshop under my belt, so part of the way there.

 

I know a graphic designer who also builds professional websites, he self-taught. I just wondered if this is the way to go, pretty much sounds like it.

 

Is there any books you could advise to help me along the way

There is a few books if you are willing to go with books, I personally think the webs easier like www.codecademy.com.

 

The books are in easy steps -

The first three books I brought was Web Design in easy steps an then the html and css books! they do help a lot as you get to know all the basics, then go further into detail about what the languages can do.