How do I learn web design? that is a question I once asked myself and the answer I gave myself was very wrong. I thought (as I know many others did) that if I was to learn a bit of everything Ill be able to get a good income with ease. If I am a jack of all trades I will be able to get work in all areas, right? Wrong!
The simple truth is – people will always go to the man who specializes in the service they are after, over a man who has touched on it before. That is why my first piece of advice is find your area.
That may seem a bit hard, as you likely have not really had enough experience to say what your area is and because of that I am going to go through the path I would recommend to anyone wishing to become a web designer.
First of all go and buy Adobe Dreamweaver. You will hear all around the internet not to bother now days but trust me, it simplifies things. Personally I rarely use it now days but without it I have no doubt that I would not know half of what I do now.
Adobe Dreamweaver will help you familiarize yourself with the workings of a website. See how you have “id”‘s given to your “div tags” etc. and how the CSS styles the website. I would also advise you not to creating websites in tables and Photoshop as this does not really help you too much when it comes to becoming professional at it.
Next I would advise you learn CSS. Learning CSS is not hard at all. It is simply remembering what each command does and most of which are pretty obvious. For example “width:100px;” means that the width is going to be 100 pixels.
I often got discouraged when I couldn’t figure out why there was a margin at the top of the page, but this automatically is put there, simply place “body {margin-top:0px;}” in your CSS to remove this.
Stick to HTML and CSS and do not stray off to Flash! Flash is very outdated and does not do well for SEO, when you gain experience you will learn that most interactivity Flash brings to the table, jQuery also brings.
Do your research on YouTube, Google and if you have any money a website like lynda.com or treehouse.com
Remember that we all had to start somewhere and there are a lot of people online that will try to help you and also those that will try to discourage you, but please don’t let them.
