How Do I Become A Good Amateur Web Designer Without Going To College?
Could you name me sites, cheap or free online classes, books, & forums on html. I guess I will learn the other languages later, but I’m doing this more as a hobby. I don’t feel like going to a community college to learn this stuff, maybe an adult education center though. Could you also recommend other languages that I could learn to be a good amateur web designer? I also want to build my own website.
Tags: Amateur, Become, College, Designer, Going, Good, Without
February 28th, 2010 at 7:48 pm
If taking a college course is not possible, you still have options, they just aren’t quite as good. tag; see the link above
If you are looking for other languages, there are several that would help you out:
CSS (for designing style-sheets & achieving richer effects than HTML provides)
JavaScript (for adding some awesome functionality)
PHP (for adding functionality & security)
C++ (for building applications)
There are several more than these as well; these are just a few.
Just some quick tips for just getting started on a few tags you don’t want to use:
Never use , , or tags; visit http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp for info on how to achieve better effects using basic CSS.
Don’t use the
Good luck
February 28th, 2010 at 10:38 pm
I wouldn’t want to discourage you too much, but pretty much “good” & “amateur” together with web design are an oxymoron.
It is true that you can learn everything you need online, but there is also quite an awful lot of junk online too.
CSS/HTML/XHTML & some other bits & peices -> http://www.w3schools.com
I use http://php.net for my PHP. & http://mysql.com for MySQL.
For my CMS of choice, I like drupal, as it is well documented & very flexible, though to be fair it can be quite a steep learning curve. So, for drupal I use http://api.drupal.org & http://drupal.org.
Unfortunately, I don’t know any single source for js/ajax/ahah that would be useful for a beginner. There’s plenty out there, but it takes a lot of trial & error to get to “glean” what you need from the examples.
However, there are a few good libraries out there. My current favorite is jQuery (http://jquery.com) Which gives you the advantage of powerful tools & a simpler syntax for doing powerful things with js, without all the code.
Regarding languages: PHP is pretty much required. Modern web stuff requires at least a good handle on JS, but also some experience of when to use the web for your work rather than the js on your website client’s machines. And finally you must really learn CSS. Well thought out CSS can often vastly reduce the effort required to do cool advanced web things.
Good luck
March 3rd, 2010 at 10:03 pm
It is true there is alot of junk to sift through when trying to learn how to be a website designer online.
I started learning basic CSS then how to slice and export my pages from Photoshop CS4. This alone helped me to create some descent sites for the little experience I had. Learning how to implement JavaScript files helped with photo galleries and slideshows which always helps brighten up any page. So my advice would be check out you tube for some CSS Tutorials, then tutorials for slicing and exporting from Photoshop into dreamweaver (which is what I used)