5 Free Web Design Courses to Kickstart Your Career
To become a designer, an obvious choice is to go to design school. To become a web designer, however, you don’t have to pay tuition. Web design courses are available for free, and you are throwing money away if you’re paying from it. (Unless you want to throw money away to motivate yourself, which is actually very understandable.)
Without further ado, here’s what you can learn about web design even back home somewhere in Mississauga.
#1. CodeAcademy
The most user-friendly, beginner-catering, and popular website where you can learn to do web design. CodeAcademy has more than 24 million users all across the globe and offers learning six programming languages, most of them directly related to the web. The learning process is made easier with interactive tutorials and all that good jazz. If you’re new to web design, give CodeAcademy a try at the very least.
#2. The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Making a Website
If you’re just starting out, this course by Adam Dachis is just about perfect, covering web design from the basic principles to actually doing design with PhotoShop. It teaches you a bit of HTML and CSS, as well as stitching together the nuts and bolts to launch a live website. The course spans a mere 27 pages but is full of useful information. It’s available as a PDF, too.
#3. Aquent Gymnasium
Catered more towards the intermediate learner spectrum, Aquent gymnasium offers free courses on responsive web design, web design for coders, and user interface development. The courses are well-structured and have helped thousands to break through trending libraries and technologies like jQuery, responsive design and HTML5.
#4. HTML5Rocks
Not really a “course” per se, the HTML5Rocks tutorial section showcases immensely useful tutorials for website development of upper-intermediate and advanced complexity. If you’re new to this stuff, it’s still rewarding to look at, because in this resource developers share how they have approached real-life problems. Insight into a developer’s thinking processes is just priceless for those just starting out.
#5. The Advanced Content Marketing Guide
The Advanced Content Marketing Guide seems out of place, doesn’t it? We’re talking web design after all, aren’t we? However, there are many people who want to design a website for themselves but haven’t thought at all about what they want to publish on that website. This fun read covers everything from content planning to coming up with ideas, writing and monetizing the written word. Don’t forget that having a website is all fine and dandy, but you have to put it to use at some point.