Posted by jefffffffrey91 on June 21, 2010 at 10:03pm
How did all of you learn and become well versed on basic website/ design and development in Adobe Dreamweaver/Photoshop/InDesign/etc? I've been paying an arm and a leg lately for a designer and I would like to learn how to do it myself.
Does anybody know of any free web design/development classes in the Southern California area or even hosted webinars/videos on html/css/coding basics?
Comments
Well it's not free, but I
Well it's not free, but I think it's great deal for your money is Lynda.com. There are videos on HTML, CSS, and Drupal. I recommend checking it out.
Another promising source
I have used Lynda.com for a long time and I love it. Their tutorials and level of expertise is great and I have learned a lot from their videos. I keep them handy all the time and use them as reference as I work on projects. As Ishmael-sanchez indicated, it's not free but it's definitely worth your money. Another promising training source which just launched is http://membership.thinkvitamin.com/.
trial and error
I learned by trial and error... That is, whenever I want/need to do something I research it and learn, usually from online docs. I've never taken a class, webinar, etc. The tutorials on http://www.w3schools.com/ are free and really useful, and that's usually my first stop when I get stuck on something. I personally don't bother with Dreamweaver, but I learned Photoshop and Illustrator by opening a new project and messing around. It's maybe not the fastest method, but there you have it! :p
Web Design
I went to school for design classes, which took a little longer but really added to my knowledge base.
I still use Lynda.com to keep abreast of web development and use its tutorials to keep fresh.
I design, but I don't charge an arm and a leg!
Second Lynda.com & W3Schools
Lynda.com is great since it doesn't quite cost "an arm and a leg"... very good quality trainings. W3Schools is also good for learning basics, though it doesn't cover product-specific (e.g. Adobe product) issues.
Courses at a local community college can also be a bargain and help you get to know others with skills and knowledge... people you can network with and bounce ideas off of. I've had community college courses in digital imaging that weren't expensive and were taught by an excellent instructor with extensive knowledge and industry experience.
About me:
Times are very different from
Times are very different from when I learned web design. When I learned it it was all copy paste and the bare bones guild to html.
Now I would defiantly go through w3schools.com (under html ,css, javascript, and jquery) and sense this is a drupal forum I would also recommend some of the early mustartdseedmedia.com podcasts, or the lullabot themeing videos. A book that I recommend about html/css is by apress: Pro CSS and HTML Design Patterns. That will get you where you need to be with front end development.
The difficult thing about design is that the essence of it is not a skill that can be taught. Learning Photoshop is the easiest part of it and for that a class at your local community collage or adobe's learning website would be fine. However, this is not design. Pick up a recent copy of [the magazine] Practical Web design (.net) and a copy of the book Non-Designer's Design & Type Book by Robin Williams. Design is Art and not science. You could be the greatest developer in the world and be a crappy designer, which is not a bad thing.
good point
frob makes a really good point. Technical skills and design skills are completely different things. I came into the field from the design side and learned the technical of necessity. Learning via wc3schools worked best for me because I already had my vision of what I wanted, so I was learning what I needed for each specific step of building my site, rather than "learning how to build a website" in general. How you best learn to develop websites will depend a lot on which perspective you're coming from and how specific your needs are.
I recommend teamtreehouse
I recommend teamtreehouse
Hadi Farnoud
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