hi there am 33 years of age and recently chucked my warehouse job to go to college and learn web design/development, any info or advice people could give would be apprieciated, as you can tell i've went out on a limb here lol just looking for info to give me a good start, really need to do this.

 

cheers

Welcome to the forums!

 

Good on your going for it. I don't know what your course covers but they key skills are learning HTML(version5), CSS (Casacading Style Sheets) till you can write them without thinking. It's also useful to get to grip with learning the basics of Javascript, even if it's just working with "Jquery", that will give you a good start. From there the next step is programming languages such as PHP, Ruby or ASP if you want to get into that.

 

Aside note, many college courses still teach "Flash" - it's virtually dead now so not really worth spending (too much) time on it.

Edited May 11, 201511 yr by BlueDreamer

Treehouse is a very good place to start. https://teamtreehouse.com/ Codeschool https://www.codeschool.com/ also compliments this very well. They took me from zero to being employed within 8 months.

Edited May 11, 201511 yr by rbrtsmith

I think you can search on google or youtube. They have anything I need. And should remember that, learning is never too late

Even though there are many free high quality tutorials and articles available it can be hard for a beginner to filter google- and youtube search results. Here is a few tips:

1. Focus on tutorials/articles that teaches pure HTML(5), CSS(3) and JavaScript.
   
   Though frameworks are very popular you should know the basic technologies first.
   Avoid Bootstrap until you master CSS, avoid jQuery until you know the basics of JavaScript etc.
   
2. Do not waste your time learning how to develop in WYSIWYGs.
   
   Stay away from tutorials that teaches how to use Dreamweaver and other drag 'n' drop programs.
   You only need one tool to learn to develop websites - a code editor.
   
3. Only learn from the newest sources
   
   The standards and practices in web development changes very fast so many articles you will find are not up to date.

It's absolutely good to know the low-level technologies, i.e. HTML/PHP/CSS/Javascript.

 

But I think the better question is what is your personal goal?

 

Are you a coder, are you a designer, do you want to build web apps, do you want to make money building client websites?

 

You may be so early on that you should work on low-level tutorials to get acquainted and see what you enjoy the most.

 

At the same time, I'm going to advise you also work with a content management system like WordPress. Particularly if you choose to build websites for small to medium sized businesses.

 

Using WordPress can be a vehicle to learning all of the above technologies above. The reason i say this is because I learned web design coming from engineering, and spent too much time tweaking code where my clients didn't see or appreciate the effort.

 

It all goes back to your end goal... if you want to become a developer, you need code experience. If you want to target small business websites and learn the online marketing side of things, go with WordPress.