So I'm a multi-media major and I wanted to focus on web design. I quickly learned that I have to keep myself updated because my school only provided 2 classes really dealing with web design. I often find myself question and wondering if I am in the right field and where do I fit in. Just looking at code excites and stimulates my mind. I absolutely love it. It is an intimidating field but I need to get over that and gain some confidence. I am currently a web manager for and online business and I get to design a few things but to get to the nitty gritty back end stuff i have to go through our developer. I want to be in his shoes or at least somewhere close. I need to be in a creative field but I really want coding to be involved. If I could learn it all I would but my bandwidth right now won't allow for it. My real question is what time of classes should I take or areas should I study more of the become a better coder and not just someone that knows HTML5
There are many paths to become a successful web developer, if i were you i would pick up PHP because everyone says its easy and useful, i picked up a career in C#, studied two years to find out it wasn't what i really wanted to do because its meant for desktop applications as well. Anyways, if you want to build your own sites all by yourself you are going to have work a lot, coding, design, administration, etc requires time and knowledge. Everyone can set up a wordpress template but making a wordpress-looking site from scratch requires some knowledge and time. Stick to what you really like, if it is design or coding, just get really good at it. Also for a bit more advanced stuff than HTML5 you could pick up javascript, jquery etc etc Check, http://www.w3schools.com/ best place for basic stuff imho.
A word of advice: stay away from W3C School. It can be a good resource for basic learning, but despite their status as "vanguard" of web standards, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) will teach you sloppy coding. Web standards are constantly changing and certain HTML tags that were once acceptable get deprecated; unfortunately, the W3C is usually the last place to update their information. A perfect example of this is the "font" tag. This tag was deprecated nearly three years ago and web developers were encouraged to use CSS to change font attributes; yet the W3C only recently added this information to their website. They still have the font tag in their HTML tutorial. If you are looking for a good place to learn web development, I would highly recommend codeacademy.com. Not only are their coding techniques compliant with current web standards, but they will teach you HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, Python and much more interactively. It is completely free and you can track your progress.
If you're interested in web design primarily, I would recommend getting intimate with CSS and JavaScript. What you can design nowadays with CSS alone is impressive, but throw some good AJAX and other useful scripts into it and you can definitely wow some clients. I'd also suggest, like Octohedron suggested, getting familiar with WordPress - from top to bottom. WordPress - being a staple CMS - is always in high demand and will make you more valuable if you can build it from scratch. There are also a lot of frameworks you could get familiar with. Bootstrap and Foundation are fairly common as well as CakePHP and Laravel for backends. A lot of developers are using these currently and will prevent you from having to build a massive framework on your own.