I work on a Mac. Where is the best place to begin learning Web design?

Question

I don't have the cash or time to put into a full out program at a college. But I'd love to take single courses or training sessions to get me started. I have no web experience other than my ability to prepare photography and images for the web. I've been contributing 95% of my work to print design and I'd like to venture out of that habit.

I work out of Chicago

Answer 1

The beauty of the internet is that it is cross platform, and learning to design web pages is something that can be done regardless of the system you're running :-)

As to your question, it really comes down to what you want to learn. A lot of people, (particularly people who are more interested in the graphic design aspect of web design), are perfectly happy to use a program such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver to generate web pages. There is, (of course), expense involved in this method, and to be perfectly honest, you really wouldn't be learning web design in that case so much as you'd be learning how to use a program that makes web pages, which is actually a different thing.

If you are interested in learning HTML and web page design from the ground up, you're going to want to find a non-intimidating place to start, otherwise, you might find yourself overwhelmed. I have found that an excellent place to start learning raw HTML was here:

http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tut/

Once you've gotten through those lessons and feel like you have a pretty firm grasp of everything, I'd recommend progressing on to CSS, which will turn your HTML coding world upside down, and open up a whole *new* world of design possibilities. In fact, the combination of solid HTML coding and good, clean CSS is far more powerful than even the best visual editors, such as FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

A great CSS learning resource:

http://www.htmldog.com/guides/cssbeginner/


And finally, once you've mastered all their is to know about layout and design, you'll probably want to move on to creating interactive and dynamic web pages that change based upon user selections and needs...For that, you'll need to brush up a bit on JavaScript and probably a little bit of PHP. By the time you get to that point, I imagine you'll be able to sniff out a halfway decent learning resource for yourself, but just in case, the w3cschools are always a good choice:

JavaScript
http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp

PHP
http://www.w3schools.com/php/default.asp

Sorry if this has been a bit overwhelming...I'm just throwing the whole road out in front of you...Trust me though, a great start is with that first link I posted...you'll be messing with your first web page in minutes!

Answer 2

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Answer 3

Google. Seriously. The two most important tools for a web programmer or designer is HTML/XHTML and CSS. Good information is scattered across tutorials, blogs, and articles. There's a site called web developer's handbook which has a number of very useful links :http://www.alvit.de/handbook/ . Once you can write HTML and CSS code by hand, you are on your way to learning web design.

Answer 4

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Answer 5

We don't know where you live, so it would be difficult to recommend a place that offers single courses, etc.

You could check out this site http://forums.macnn.com/

But, I should warn you they can be very nasty to newbies.