web Design Course

murraymints

I'd love to learn web design in my spare time. Any suggestions that aren't too expensive and not online? Not looking for anything to fancy or trying to set up a business just for winter evenings after Christmas?

cmcsoft

Have a look at http://www.nightcourses.com . There's plenty of nightcourses out there available. There is also a nightcourse guide with directory listings of nightcourses in different disciplines

oeb

To be honest, you are probably much better off teaching yourself. Any web design courses that I have heard about recently tend to be very out of date.

ntlbell

buy a book, have a read, look at some tutorials online...

you really don't need to do a course

The Mighty Ken

What kind of business are we talking about here? If it's a Web design/development services business then you're not going to be able to compete with seasoned verterans for contracts by reading a few books over the course of a few weeks/months. You'll be competing with people in the industry for up to and over a decade, some of whom are very skilled and talented.

If you're planning on setting up your own online business and you intend to take it seriously as a business then you'd be better off getting professionals or at least semi-professionals to do the job for you.

If it's just a hobbyist/enthusiast thing then the best way to learn is, as ntlbell says, to pick up a few books and immerse yourself in online tutorials, Web design forums, etc. The quality of classroom courses is generally appalling and it's a very expensive way to learn - covering the first few chapters of, say, a €45 Actionscript book could cost you a few grand in a classroom and you don't even get to learn in your own time.

ntlbell

The Mighty Ken wrote: »

What kind of business are we talking about here? If it's a Web design/development services business then you're not going to be able to compete with seasoned verterans for contracts by reading a few books over the course of a few weeks/months. You'll be competing with people in the industry for up to and over a decade, some of whom are very skilled and talented.

If you're planning on setting up your own online business and you intend to take it seriously as a business then you'd be better off getting professionals or at least semi-professionals to do the job for you.

If it's just a hobbyist/enthusiast thing then the best way to learn is, as ntlbell says, to pick up a few books and immerse yourself in online tutorials, Web design forums, etc. The quality of classroom courses is generally appalling and it's a very expensive way to learn - covering the first few chapters of, say, a €45 Actionscript book could cost you a few grand in a classroom and you don't even get to learn in your own time.

Aye,

you will usually be though by a tutor with very little real world experience in design and will be reading to you from a book you could of sat at home and read yourself...

Axwell

The Mighty Ken wrote: »

What kind of business are we talking about here? If it's a Web design/development services business then you're not going to be able to compete with seasoned verterans for contracts by reading a few books over the course of a few weeks/months. You'll be competing with people in the industry for up to and over a decade, some of whom are very skilled and talented.

If you're planning on setting up your own online business and you intend to take it seriously as a business then you'd be better off getting professionals or at least semi-professionals to do the job for you.

If it's just a hobbyist/enthusiast thing then the best way to learn is, as ntlbell says, to pick up a few books and immerse yourself in online tutorials, Web design forums, etc. The quality of classroom courses is generally appalling and it's a very expensive way to learn - covering the first few chapters of, say, a €45 Actionscript book could cost you a few grand in a classroom and you don't even get to learn in your own time.

He already said its just for something to do in the winter evenings after the winter in his post.

OP as people have pointed out, a lot of the courses available are dated and far frome value for money. A few classes teaching you the basics (outdated basics at that) and then charging you a fortune. Get yourself a few books and look at online tutorial and give yourself a goal to build yourself a persoanl site or something along that lines and enjoy the fact you dont have to go outside the door when its cold and wet to go to your course and sit in with a cuppa instead!

p

As people have said, most course aren't the best. However if you know that going in and just use it to motivate you and get started it can be a good thing. You can also compliment the course by getting a decent book and building on what the course taught you.

I highly recommend the 'Heads First XHTML & CSS' book for beginners. It's well thought out, and teaches a lot of stuff you need to know to start out. It also teaches modern practices, which will set you up very well indeed!

murraymints

Hey thanks for all the replies wasn't expecting that. The Heads First book looks good.It wouldn't be out of date because it was published in 2005? Any other suggestions for suitable books? Thanks

S.M.B.

Sitepoint do a great range of books.

Sitepoint Book Matrix

The Mighty Ken

Axwell wrote: »

He already said its just for something to do in the winter evenings after the winter in his post.

He also said he was trying to set up a business so I was just curious.

Axwell

The Mighty Ken wrote: »

He also said he was trying to set up a business so I was just curious.

No he didnt

Not looking for anything to fancy or trying to set up a business just for winter evenings after Christmas?

p

murraymints wrote: »

Hey thanks for all the replies wasn't expecting that. The Heads First book looks good.It wouldn't be out of date because it was published in 2005? Any other suggestions for suitable books?

It's not out of date, I've read it recently (with a view to buying it for a friend) and it's by far the best book on the subject I found.

The Mighty Ken

Axwell wrote: »

No he didnt

Oh yeah. He said he wasn't trying to set up a business. My bad. :pac:

Also probably worth registering at Creative Ireland as you can get plenty of support there while you're learning.

roadsafety.ie

Hi, I recently did a dreamweaver mx 2004 course. I am a transition year student and I thought it would be an interesting thing to do, and also I have used this to build a website for my mini-company.

The course cost me E350 but I also got the hosting for my website included in that. I had read some books on the subject so i had a good understanding before doing it.
I did find it useful as I now have a good understanding of how to use dreamweaver and it got me up and running. It was also good because there was only 1 other person doing it, so things ran smoothly.
I thought it was useful having someone to explain things and fix problems when I was starting.
It ran for 4 thursday nights 7-10 in maynooth.

Here is the link to the website if you are interested http://www.progressivetraining.ie.
And this http://www.roadsafety.ie is the website I am building at the moment if you want to have a look. (there is a small problem with the images if you are using ie6, am about to fix that)

Hope that helps, Michael-John:)

murraymints

Axwell wrote: »

No he didnt

YEAH. I had to have a quick look at my original thread to see whether I was starting a business or not! Thanks for replies some great options there.

ve

Here's my 2c on the subject...

Web Design and Web Development are two different things, and a lot of people, some of which who call themselves professionals still don't know the difference between the two. Both professions are often underestimated in terms of level of skill required to pull off and the reason for this is primarily because they are easy to get in to / started in the first place. Very briefly... Design: is the process by which you take an idea in turn it in to something that can be implemented through code. This means everything from deciding on how a website will be broken up (sitemap) along with desired content and how everything will look (fonts, colours, graphics, layout, etc). A lot of designers will not even turn on a computer to accomplish this process, as pencil and paper will often suffice. Development: takes a design and turns it in to a workable, accessible, standards compliant, agent compatible website/interface. This is where your languages will come in to play. A lot of the web design and development books available are often just focused in the development phase discussing things like css, xhtml, php, actionscript, etc, so by keeping them separate in your head from the start will help.

Now you may be thinking well I don't want to become a professional, I just want to create a website. My advise is this, don't take the shortest route to produce something on a screen. I advise you to immerse yourself in some "best practice" texts to get a feel for the challenges that exist. Web Standards, Web Browsers and Web Design & Development are changing all the time, so I assure you courses can fill you with all the promises in the world, but this field of study is something you need to be able to learn by yourself and dedicate the time to learn well.

When starting out I don't recommend you use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors, that are offered in the likes of Dreamweaver etc. Dreamweaver is a fine piece of software but if you are using it, use the code editor instead, don't rely on anything but yourself to generate the final source code. If you want to save yourself a fortune in licensing costs, use Notepad instead while you're starting off and while your implementations are not that complex.

One final thing I'll say to you, don't use tables for page layout (use CSS for page element layout, styling of page elements, etc). Tables should just be used for displaying tabular data.

Best of luck

The Mighty Ken

ve wrote: »

Design: is the process by which you take an idea in turn it in to something that can be implemented through code. This means everything from deciding on how a website will be broken up (sitemap) along with desired content

You're actually referring to Information Arhictecture there to an extent. For a lot of smaller Web agencies who are producing small to medium sized sites, having their designer determine the site map and dictating the functionality based on the design mock-ups usually works fine. Well, they get away with it anyway!

However - and this is where a lot of Web agencies screw things up and end up losing clients - when a project is more involved and complex, the above model simply doesn't work. Projects generally descend into utter chaos. I've seen it (and suffered it) so many times and it still makes by blood boil. For a reasonably large and complex site, and even for a smaller, complex application, a large chunk of the project budget should go towards agreeing and documenting scope/Information Architecture, etc.

So there's a lot more to building a website than just creative design and programming. The requirements gathering and scoping is of huge importance too as well as having a very tight process in place to ensure a project runs smoothly.