Greetings, I'm currently 22 years old, and my dream is to be a web designer, and I am asking for your help. I am currently attending a local college to cover my basic academic needs, and my plan is to transfer somewhere to begin my career as a web designer. I have only dabbled in the design field, I love designing and I consider myself pretty good with Photoshop. I'm looking to get myself a jump start on school and teach myself what I can, but I don't know where to get started. Everything that I know as of today is self taught. I have put together a few websites of my own, but they were all through websites like Forumotion and other sites that provided the template for me to fill in. I've attempted to put sites together from scratch but had trouble figuring out the process of hosting it to the public. So as an absolute beginner, I'm turning to you guys to ask: Where do I begin? What's a good way for me to get started? What should I focus on? Where did you get started? TL;DR - Newbie asking for help. Decent grasp on Photoshop, but new to the web design world and looking for direction. Your time is greatly appreciated, Thanks!
A warm welcome to you Wackedd! To be a web designer is really interesting and I would also like to learn some basic on it as well as looking forward to you to have a great discussions. Cheers!
http://www.w3schools.com http://www.w4schools.org YouTube Videos Forums School These are great places to get information about coding and web design from. Also, welcome to the forum. I hope you enjoy your stay here, can learn from some of the other members, and can share some of your knowledge with others. I hope to see you around. Good luck to you.
Thanks a bunch to you both for the responses!!! I'll definitely be around trying to learn what I can! Thank you very much for those sources Katniss!! Any good Youtube channels or anything of the sort that you know of that I can check out?
Welcome to the forum. You can look at wordpress.com or weebly.com to start building your websites. They are both free to sign up. This is just for practice. But when you are actually ready to build a site I would get my own domain and hosting.
You should ask around on your campus, or talk to an advisor. I bet even your community college has some courses on programming and basic HTML, CSS, Javascript, Jquerry, etc. I'd be really surprised if they didn't at least cover the basics. It's probably in a "Computer Science" track and not an "Art" track so that may be why you're not seeing the classes you need. Like I said, ask some older kids, or just go talk to an advisor and they can recommend which courses you should take. I started in a Community College too, to help cover the costs of tuition, and after 2 years, transfered to a larger university with more sophisticated programs. I hold a BS in "Emerging Technology" and later went back and earned an MBA in Ecommerce. I was mostly self taught too, started back when I was in highschool. - You can download free trials to software - or get a very steep education discount to purchase software since you are currently a student. There's also lots of programs for free out there that can do everything Dreamweaver, and etc can do. Just google "Free HTML editor" - Heck, you can even code a website in word or notepad. It isn't pretty, but it works lol. It's a good way to experiement with and learn code. Also download some open source files, study how their code is done, play with it, try editing it, etc. The best way to learn is by doing. I also highly recommend the W3 and W4 schools. I STILL use them, even as a professional Web Developer because sometimes I'll forget or encounter a new challenge They are really great websites.