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Best Webpage Design Training?
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
in Work & Study
Does anyone know/have experience with an online webpage design training course using Dreamweaver/Adobe Photoshop?
If so, who did you train with?
Was it any good etc?
I have decided to look for training in what I think I might be good at.
If so, who did you train with?
Was it any good etc?
I have decided to look for training in what I think I might be good at.
0
Comments
I imagine a lot of places take advantage in the same way that many web design companies do - it's a bit of a misunderstood "black art" that nobody can really put a price on.
If you have a good knack for design (and by your photographs, you clearly have some artistic bones in your body!) then the best idea I can think of would be to start picking up free tutorials online to get started, then progress onto maybe buying some books.
Photoshop especially seems to be a very personalised thing - I use it entirely differently to other people I know in order to achieve the same results. So gaining an overall understanding of the major points of it is better than learning "This is how you do X, Y, and Z, now go make a website!"
Dreamweaver is a fantastic piece of kit and I used to use it a lot when I made websites (and occasionally still dabble) but the big money these days is in building interactive sites, so a good understanding of stuff like PHP and XHTML would be good to get. Again, there are tonnes of free resources on the net.
As far as design goes, CSS is an absolute must. Not only does it make creating multiple pages a HECK of a lot easier, you can quite easily move to having multiple skins for a website, resizing a page entirely for a mobile view, etc.
If you can start out with the basics - clean coding, good solid design work and the odd "gimick" thrown in (such as those CSS tricks) you could spread the word around, pick up a few jobs to get you started and move on from there whilst learning the more advanced stuff.
I told my dad that I want to learn Webpage Design in Dreamweaver and he said that I should look for a company who would take me on and let me learn Dreamweaver, like on-the-job training. Which is a good idea.
Its just FINDING a company who would employ me, thats the trouble!!!
I did web design professionally for a while during my sabbatical year from uni (albeit working illegally in a third-world country) and it was tough. I taught myself, but there are lots of good tutorial websites out there.
Though to give you a flavour of what the self-taught person can acheive, here was one for which my design was the basis of:
www.egbcc.org
Dreamweaver is a fantastic program imho.
- Only site you'll need. Honestly dont go wasting money on some online lessons or whatever, you can learn everything you need to know by messing around with the programs and seeing what works. If you're a pretty computer litterate person and have a designing mind then just look up what you want to acheive on the website then remember how to do it.
I self taught myself both these programs, wasnt too hard honestly.
I started building websites back when the only thing you had access to was notepad (and the internet was steam-powered). My degree was in digital media at University of Bradford, where I learned about HTML, Flash etc (this was before CSS was commonplace), but my initial training was self-taught.
It really depends on what sort of websites you want to build, but personally I think Dreamweaver is quite old technology now. Most large sites are database-driven, that a template can sit on top of. Increasingly even smallish sites are using things like Wordpress as their content-management system. Building templates requires an understanding of HTML code and CSS (my favourite book on CSS is Dan Cederholm's Bulletproof Web Design). For more promotional sites, you'll need an understanding of Flash or similar stuff.
The great thing about the web is that you can learn how other people have done things that you like, because the code is always viewable. Assuming you have Firefox, download Chris Pedericks web developer toolbar (http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/) that gives you lots of easy options for looking at cSS etc.
There are loads of tips and advice on the web, but make sure you have a good understanding how the code works as it is hugely beneficial when developing sites to be accessible, and also more search-engine friendly.
Hope all this helps...
Olly
On the plus side, purest web design work is all about graphics and UI, you wouldn't necessarily need to code.