Web Design for beginners

Wednesday the 20th of August, 2008 at 4:21 pm

My girlfriend asked me earlier about learning web design, she wants to learn something new and possibly something that could grow into a way of earning some extra money. As I am on hand to help with web design, this seemed like the obvious choice.

Having been to uni I am well aware of the trouble with learning web design in an academic environment. Tutors are often along way behind the industry, courses are encouraged to teach software rather than the technologies behind them due to sponsorship by the companies that make them, and on top of that web design is such a broad subject encompassing so many areas it would be hard to teach even a little bit of them all. Knowing this I thought the best route would be to find a decent intro to web design course to get started then I could help her with good sites to read and what to learn through tutorials.

Courses for horses

Looking for good courses turned out to be much harder than I thought. There are several evening classes at the local adult learning centre so I read the descriptions of them. The one that seemed the closest as a basic intro was teaching tables and imagemaps as a selling point and didn’t mention CSS!

I know I go on about standards and things sometimes (though not as much as I could) but teaching things that have been widely frowned upon for the last few years and seemingly not mentioning the most commonly used languages (like CSS) seemed pretty crazy.

I have come across several posts recently from prominent bloggers and designers that suggest that this is pretty common throughout the country and across the world. What can be done about this? I really don’t know, some sort of web design curriculum from the W3c has been mentioned in the past, and this seems like a great idea but a pretty tricky one to implement.

I am well aware that the solution on a local level would be for me to put my money (well time and effort) where my mouth is and sort out teaching a course. However I am monumentally bad at public speaking! In short I would be a terrible teacher. Even in conversation I am prone to start talking about browser rendering issues and jQuery to people who don’t know what HTML is so I’m sure I would confuse students far more than teach them anything.

Intertubes to the rescue

I spend what feels like 27 hours a day in front of the screen working, reading blogs, searching for inspiration and generally filling my head with junk. I know there are alot of incredible people publishing great tutorials, tips, hints and tricks for free in their own time. GO INTERTUBES! So I thought I would try and dig up the best tutorials for beginners and top blogs beginners should be reading to get into good habits with standards, best practices and whatnot.

Tutorials

There are worse places to start than http://www.w3schools.com/. It’s beginning to look a bit dated but the content is excellent. The girlfriend is doing the HTML tutorial as we speak. I’ll admit I still use the site to look up things from time to time.

http://nettuts.com/ is a really great site for all levels. Some may be a bit advanced but I found a couple, such as this that will defiantly start you off on the route from noob to rockstar in no time!

Sitepoint has been one of the top resources for articles for a long time now, there is a vast amount of information. Including tutorials for beginners such as this one.

I am sure that there must be loads out there teaching the right things in an easy to understand way for beginners and I will try and keep this section updated as I dig them out for my girlfriend.

Stuff to install

I am not a fan of WYSIWYG so have been getting her started with my favourite windows text editor, notepad++. I am sure beginners can get something pretty up more quickly with Dreamweaver but I really think that decent knowledge of core technologies is the most useful thing in web design.

Yeh yeh it’s obvious but Firefox has got to be in here! I am also going to install the HTML Tidy and web developers toolbar extensions (probably some others as she needs them).

We’ll cross the graphics software bridge when we get to it! I have an old version of Photoshop on my old computer or I guess we could go the GIMP route but to be honest I don’t know it very well.

Blogs and inspiration

This could be a post in itself so I will just put a few of the most important ones down.

I’m not sure if A list apart is a bit too much for a beginner but it is so well written that I feel it should be on here. Vitamin is again aimed at more experienced users but I think there are so many useful articles on there that any user could find something helpful on it. If nothing else knowing what people more experienced are talking about and interested in has got to be good.

As far as inspiration I think that it is important that beginners should start from an early point looking for great examples of design. Design Meltdown is one of my favourite places to look for inspiration, having things broken down in to sections is so useful. Fave-up is another great gallery.

It is not really a blog or inspiration but Design Float is another site that I visit extensivly that cannot fail to be useful for anyone interested in design.

So what have I missed? What sites did people use when they started out? I have only listed a few here but there are tonnes out there and I will try and add more as I think of them or they are mentioned.

Categories: Web Design
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