learn to design web

                                                                                                   
That’s where resources like the ones below can come in handy. These sites offer courses modeled after those you’d find (or actually from) leading colleges and universities. They’re a great option if you’re not sure where to start, or if you want to bridge the gaps in your current training.
They can also be excellent options if you’ve taken courses in the past, but want to make sure your knowledge and skill-set is completely up to date.

Google Developers University Consortium

The Google Developers University Consortium offers a ton of great courses for developers interested in working with Google products. Of course that includes designing and programming for Android, as well as Google Maps, Google App Engine, and more. It also offers more general web technology courses, including an AJAX tutorial, PHP development, and information on GIS and KML.
In addition to using the University Consortium for learning, you can also submit a course, including course materials, assignments, lectures, and projects. The only catch is that it has to be Creative Commons-licensed.

Dev.Opera

Dev.Opera can help you learn all the latest open web technologies, including JavaScript, CSS3, HTML5, and SVG. In addition to web technologies, Dev.Opera also offers up courses and tutorials on Add-Ons, Mobile, and TV. And of course if you have information to share with the Opera development community, you can submit your own articles.

Lynda.com

Lynda.com is one of the largest premium tutorial sites for software, business, and creative topics. They have over 1900 video courses, all by expert teachers. For $25/month, you get unlimited access to all of their courses, making it a good deal for anyone who wants constant access to new learning materials.
Lynda.com’s courses are all mobile-friendly, so you don’t have to be chained to your computer to learn. And you can even create your own custom playlists of the courses you want to watch, which can then be shared with others (of course, they’ll need their own Lynda.com account to watch those videos). Lynda.com does offer a free 7-day trial, so you can test the waters before you commit.
 

Don’t Fear the Internet

Don’t Fear the Internet is a little different from other resources on this list. It covers basic HTML and CSS, but was specifically created for non-web designers, and is instead aimed at creatives in general.
So far there are seven lessons, covering typography, targeting content, CSS, developer tools, HTML, and even a basic primer on the internet. Every lesson is delivered in video format, but with text notes you can easily refer to later.
 

P2PU’s School of Webcraft

P2PU’s School of Webcraft is a peer-powered learning environment that’s backed by Mozilla. It’s all completely free, and you can take individual courses or complete beta challenges to test your current knowledge.
Current courses offered include basics like choosing web hosting or a text editor, as well as more advanced topics like Coffeescript and PHP. There are even courses offered in Spanish. And like most resources of its kind, you can create and submit your own courses, too.

Codecademy

Codecademy lets you interactively learn to code, all for free. There are courses for everything from basic HTML to JavaScript to Ruby and other more complex programming languages.
The nice thing about Codecademy is its incredibly interactive nature. Every single lesson includes an interactive element that helps you retain the information you’ve learned. This is a big deal for those who learn by doing, rather than just by reading or listening.
In addition to standard courses, Codecademy also has a strong community where you can join groups to code with others, as well as profiles that let you show off badges and progress.

Code School

Code School is another online learning environment that stresses learning by doing. They offer “Paths” that give you a clearcut list of courses you should take to learn different disciplines. there are paths for Ruby, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, and iOS. They also offer “Electives”, which cover topics outside of the basic Paths, including Git, R, and Chrome DevTools.
Code School offers both free and premium courses, with the most basic courses generally offered for free. And of course, you don’t have to follow the pre-defined Paths if you’d prefer to strike out on your own.
 

Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby is one of the best free Ruby courses online. It’s funny, easy to follow, and has great illustrations and comic strips included that really help drive the concepts home.

Udemy

Udemy offers courses from leading instructors around the world. A lot of the courses offered are tech- and design-focused, though there are also some great courses about startups and other topics.
Udemy also lets you teach your own courses, and earn money doing so. Courses range in price from only a few dollars right up to hundreds, depending on the subject, instructor, and length. There are even some free courses, though you might have to dig to find them.

Skillfeed

Skillfeed is a relatively new offering from Shutterstock. They offer a paid monthly subscription (just $19/month) to access courses, though there’s a 7-day free trial as well.
Courses are focused on technical and creative skills, and there are also “Skill Snacks” that offer up quick tips and tricks that you can learn in just a few minutes. Skillfeed video classes can be accessed from your desktop, laptop, or mobile device, too, so you can learn anywhere.
 

Treehouse

Treehouse offers a huge library of step-by-step video courses and tutorials for a variety of in-demand technologies. You can learn to build websites and web apps, mobile apps, or even how to start a business.
There are currently over 1000 videos in the library, with more being added all the time to keep you up-to-date. As you complete courses, you’ll earn badges you can proudly display on your profile to show your achievements. And each course has interactive elements to make it easier for you to retain the information you learn.
Pricing ranges from $25-$49/month, depending on which plan you choose. The more expensive Gold plan gives you access to feedback on your projects, as well as additional information and workshops.
 

Coursera

Coursera offers courses on a huge number of subjects, including a robust catalog of information, tech, and design courses. Courses in these subject areas include topics like social media, data science, creativity, innovation, metadata, digital democracy, and much more. Courses are offered on a regular basis, and are done more like a traditional college with weekly lessons and assignments. Each course runs from just five or six weeks up to 19 weeks or more.

uts+ Premium Courses

The Tuts+ Network has been a leader in design and technology tutorials for years, with both free and premium resources. Now, their Tuts+ Premium Courses give a more formal educational environment for learning about some of your favorite topics. There are courses on everything from parallax scrolling in web design to jQuery to web application design. Most courses run a dozen to two dozen lessons, though there are some that fall outside of those parameters.
Courses are available to all Tuts+ Premium members (who also get the benefit of hundreds of tutorials and 73 ebooks, as well as weekly new content). Tuts+ Premium membership is $19/month (or $15/month if you pay yearly). They do offer two free courses if you want to try it out: 30 Days to Learn HTML and CSS, and 30 Days to Learn jQuery.
 

Timothy Training

Timothy Training offers tutorials for a number of web technologies and programs, including Dreamweaver, HTML and CSS, PHP, MySQL, and more. They also offer live training and even on-site training.

OpenLearn

OpenLearn is the online home of the free courses from The Open University. They offer courses on a huge variety of subjects, including technology and design. The Design and Innovation category has some great courses that would be of interest to a web designer, including Design in a Nutshell, while the Computing and ICT category has more technical courses, including classes on open source, Google, design thinking, and more.

iTunes U

iTunes U is probably one of the better known online educational portals out there, with courses from some leading educational institutions around the world. They offer courses designed by schools, colleges, universities, and other organizations from around the world.
Courses can be found by searching or browsing, as well as by looking through the top-rated charts. There are even topical collections put together by top institutions. There are a number of courses and collections aimed at designers and developers, including Developing Apps for iOS, iOS Game Development, Talking Design, and Creative Media. iTunes U can be accessed through any iOS device. Educators also have the option to create their own courses.
 

Academic Earth

Academic Earth offers free courses from colleges around the world in a variety of subjects, including Introduction to Visual Thinking, Building Dynamic Websites, and Computer Graphics. Lessons are presented in video format.
Courses offered through Academic Earth are presented by institutions including Harvard University, Dartmouth College, Columbia University, Cornell University, Indian Institute of Technology, MIT, and more.

KillerPHP.com

KillerPHP.com was created to teach practical PHP skills to web designer types, rather than developers. They offer up video tutorials on PHP and MySQL. You can subscribe for just $29 for 3 months or $99 for 12 months, or purchase courses individually.

WebDesign.com

WebDesign.com approaches online learning a bit differently than most of the other sites listed here. Instead of letting you simply watch video lessons on your own time, they offer live, interactive webinars. Webinars are also included in their video training library, which subscribers have complete access to.
They offer some live webinars for free (mostly on non-technical subjects), while others are only available to members. Membership is $197 for a full year, which includes access to the full library as well as their library. Monthly and yearly subscriptions to just the live webinars are also available, for $47 and $97 respectively.
 

Web Standards Curriculum

If you’re interested in learning web standards, then the Web Standards Curriculum, offered by W3C, is a great place to start. It covers everything from web design standards to HTML to CSS, and even has information on JavaScript, accessibility, mobile web development, and SVG.
They also include resources aimed at teachers, with additional references, teaching materials, and project activities.

Conclusion

Regardless of what you want or need to learn, you’ll almost certainly find what you’re looking for at one of the sites above. They’re a nice way to educate yourself without the cost of a formal education, but with more direction than just randomly surfing tutorials.

working online from home

Ivie Oni from Lagos never thought that she would work online, until curiosity got the best of her and she filled out a simple online form. Before she knew it, she discovered her secret to beating the recession, and being able to provide for her family while at home with her three children.
I read Ivie's blog last month and decided to feature her story in our weekly consumer report. In our phone interview she told me her amazing story. "I actually make about NGN789,250-NGN947,100 a month working from home. It's enough to comfortably replace my old jobs' income, especially considering I only work about 15-18 hours a week from home.
Working online has been a financial windfall for Ivie, who struggled for months to find a decent job but kept hitting dead ends. "I lost my job shortly after the recession hit, I needed reliable income, I was not interested in the "get rich quick" scams you see all over the internet. Those are all pyramid scams or stuff where you have to sell to your friends and family. I just needed a legitimate way to earn a living for me and my family. The best part of working online is that I am always home with the kids. Thanks to the Home Web Profit System Kit I am giving my kids the childhood they deserve."
I asked her about how she started her life-changing journey. "It was pretty easy, I filled out a short form and applied for a work-at-home kit. There is a small activation fee; it's not really free but it was under NGN300. I got the kit and within four weeks I was making over NGN500,000 a month. It's really simple, I am not a computer whiz, but I can use the internet. I don't even have to sell anything and nobody has to buy anything. Companies are constantly recruiting people for this, you should try it."
The companies you work with are worth over 100 billion dollars and are the most used sites in the internet market place, like Amazon, Google, Walmart, Delta, Apple and more... You're using the top ranked sites in the world, over 50 percent of all internet traffic flows through them everyday. It's a great opportunity and this has been helping people work at home for over 5 years. Why not get in with the internet's best and biggest companies?
There are plenty of scams on the internet claiming you can make $40,000 a month, but that is exactly what they are - scams. From my conversation with Ivie, "I am making a good salary from home, which is amazing, under a year ago I was jobless in a horrible economy. I thank God every day that I filled out that form."
Quickly, Ivie Oni was able to use the simple Home Web Profit System to make it out of the recession.

"I actually make NGN789,250-NGN947,100 a month from home." -Ivie Oni

Working online has been a financial windfall for Ivie, who struggled for months to find a decent job but kept hitting dead ends. "I lost my job shortly after the recession hit, I needed reliable income, I was not interested in the "get rich quick" scams you see all over the internet. Those are all pyramid scams or stuff where you have to sell to your friends and family. I just needed a legitimate way to earn a living for me and my family. The best part of working online is that I am always home with the kids, I save a lot of money."
Ivie had never shared her story before, and with her permission, we are putting it public.

Here's how to get started:

Step 1 Go to this link, fill out a basic online form and hit submit at Home web Profit System
Step 2 Follow the instructions at Home web Profit System and set up your account. Then they will give you the website links to post. Start posting those links. Everything gets tracked.
Step 3 You should receive your first cheque within a week or so. Or you can start to have them wire directly into your bank account. (Your first cheques will be about NGN80,000 to NGN230,000 a week. Then it goes up from there. Depends on how many links you posted online.)
Trial Offer Ends: Free Trial Promotion Ends Tomorrow:

Working online has been a financial windfall for Ivie, who struggled for months to find a decent job but kept hitting dead ends. "I lost my job shortly after the recession hit, I needed reliable income, I was not interested in the "get rich quick" scams you see all over the internet. Those are all pyramid scams or stuff where you have to sell to your friends and family. I just needed a legitimate way to earn a living for me and my family. The best part of working online is that I am always home with the kids, I save a lot of money."
Ivie had never shared her story before, and with her permission, we are putting it public.

Here's how to get started:

Step 1 Go to this link, fill out a basic online form and hit submit at Home web Profit System
Step 2 Follow the instructions at Home web Profit System and set up your account. Then they will give you the website links to post. Start posting those links. Everything gets tracked.
Step 3 You should receive your first cheque within a week or so. Or you can start to have them wire directly into your bank account. (Your first cheques will be about NGN80,000 to NGN230,000 a week. Then it goes up from there. Depends on how many links you posted online.)

web designer jobs

Being a web designer doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to make money just via web design. There are plenty of ways a Web Designer can make money these days. Myself and Andy have been working hard finding out ways web designers can make money. We have got 14 different ways web designers can make money online. If you can think of any more, then please feel free to drop in a comment. (Icon By Dapino Colada)

Blog About Web Design (such as WebDesignDev)

Many web designers have their own blogs. Having your own web design blog can benefit a designer in many different ways. You can earn money from ads, if you have great content that brings in alot of traffic, you can sell other peoples products, and also you can convert some of your traffic into clients by promoting your web design services.

Design Contests

99 Designs connects clients that need design work, to designers. You can participate in design contests such as logo designs, and earn some serious money. http://99designs.com

Design Stock Images (123RF)(istockphoto) (graphicriver)

As a web designer, you can use your funky design skills to design vectors to sell stock images on 123RF, istockphoto, and also you can design textures, templates, graphics and much more and sell them on graphic river.

Write Tutorials For Photoshop Websites

There are loads of web design tutorial sites online, such as PsdTuts. They pay greatly for brilliant tutorials. PsdTuts pay $150 per tutorial they accept, so what are you waiting for, get writing!

Freelance Switch & Smashing Magazine’s Job Board

People always need design work doing. There are loads of people who post work on job boards such as FreeLance Switch or Smashing Magazine. This can be a great way to pick up work.

Bring Offline Businesses Online

This can be an awesome way to earn alot of cash. Web Designers can get in contact with offline businesses, and offer them a fee to bring their business online. Its a great way for web designers to earn more money, and also it will help the business out and gain exposure within search engines.

Create And Promote Your Online Portfolio

Creating an online portfolio of your work generates buzz and can rank you higher for certain keywords in search engines. Blogs can publish your work, which will send traffic to your portfolio. People who like your work will hire you.

Elance

This is the mother of all online places to find work. Looking at elance.com, it looks as if there are around 1,000 new jobs posted every day for web designers to feast upon. Work ranges from HTML, CSS down to SEO and flash. I would seriously recommend checking out elance.com to make some money.

Offer Training / Write How-To’s

There are many websites such as tutor.com, ehow.com and videojug.com that pay you to make how-to videos / articles, and tutor people about a certain subject, such as web design in our case.

Become An Expert In A Niche

A web design can brand themselves as a general web designer, but if you market yourself to a certain niche then you will receive alot more clients. An example of this would be you could be a general web designer, but you could have a few business cards in the golfing niche that say we specialize in web design for golfing, and you can repeat this for many different niches.

Participate On Web Marketplaces

Web Marketplaces such as sitepoint and digitalpoint forums can earn you alot of money. It can spread your name out there, and get you alot of work. If you participate in discussions and show off your design skills, you will find yourself with lots of design work.

Affiliate Marketing

This can make you alot of money in the long run. An example of affiliate marketing would be, if you have just finished designing a website for a client, you could recommend or even offer to help them setup hosting to host the website. If they agree then you can sign them up to web hosting companies using your affiliate link. Such as DreamHost and CrucialWebHost. Then you would receive a certain % of what the client is paying each month for referring them to that web host.

Design Themes For ThemeForest

With ThemeForest, you can design themes for popular content managment systems such as wordpress and joomla, and ThemeForest will sell your theme and give you a commission. Great huh!

Offer The “All In One” Package

Clients can be lazy, and sometimes they look for web designers that offer the “All In One” package. This means that you do the web design, coding / programming and host their website for them / setup their web hosting. If you cant program, then you can always outsource or hire a programmer to complete the work.

Web Design Best Practices For SEO – Flash, HTML5 or Javascri

With the latest SEO practices and Search Engine functionality updates, your traditional web design practices might be at stake. Read below to find out if you need to abandon your old practices and adopt new technologies to conform to the current SEO world.
SEO is the first priority for most online businesses as they drive traffic and revenue from search engines. Let’s look below to determine the best SEO practices when it comes to web design.
Responsive Web Design:
Responsive Web Design is the most preferred practice for creating pages, as the code can adapt to all screen sizes and resolutions, adhering to minimal resizing metrics.


Today’s design practices and trends are facing an intense rivalry among different designs and techniques which include Responsive, Adaptive, and Fluidic design. Setting aside the eye-candy factor, Responsive web design has a significant positive impact on SEO.
With responsive design, the website includes a single url version for every platform or resolution, unlike other technologies which include multiple url versions for a single page. Search Engine giant Google officially recommends webmasters to implement responsive design because it makes webpage crawling and indexing simpler and faster.
The major issue with multiple URLs is that crawlers consider the different versions of the same page as duplicate content, wrongly penalizing the site for plagiarized content from their  own internal pages.
Abandon Flash
Flash once revolutionized the web with it’s innovative and intuitive functionality. It was the first technology to combine video capability and animation on the web. However, in the recent years most of the users and designers started abandoning Flash for many obvious reasons which include Bad Usability, Poor User Experience, and Compatibility.
Even the technology giant Apple stopped flash compatibility in the iPhone and Ipad. Moreover, another reason to abandon flash is that Flash files aren’t processed by the native browser, but requires the support of an external plug-in. However, I’m not going to jump into a deep about the user experience.
One of the main reasons to abandon Flash is that Search Engines hate flash format. Most of the Search engines are not capable of crawling the content (although Google has recently announced they are able to index Flash). Moreover, Flash has a incredibly long page-loading time, which is considered an important factor for search engine ranking. If you are developing a significantly or completely content-driven website or if you business relies on Search Engine optimization or organic traffic, you may want to consider using Flash sparingly.
Solution
I’ve evidenced several websites investing countless hours and resources into developing some major applications using Flash. So Flash may still be the ideal solution for you.
However, the best solution for SEO related issues is, instead of designing the whole webpage in Flash format, use general formatting and embed necessary flash files as elements. HTML5 is the best available alternative for Flash, which is perfectly flexible and compatible with Search Engine optimization as well.
Google Chrome has been advocating the effectiveness of HTML5 by showcasing chrome experiments to the world, which sport and feature stunning and spectacular animations. The occasional interactive doodles showcased on Google’s homepage are created in HTML5 itself.
Use JavaScript
Although neither JavaScript nor HTML5 can compete with Flash when it comes to advanced animation,
Instead of Flash, you can use JavaScript for animating your menu dropdowns, transition effects, sliders and more. It is a rather simple yet flexible approach for designing dynamic website pages. Contrary to Flash, it doesn’t create its own markup – it just modifies existing HTML elements dynamically.

20 Awesome Web Design Photoshop Tutorials

For a beginner web designer, tutorials are a very important part of the learning process. There are many website design Photoshop tutorials on the web, but few are high quality and offer an in depth view on how to create a good website. We’ve looked for the best website Photoshop tutorials and selected 20 of them, which offer detailed info and are very easy to understand. These tutorials will show you each stage of the website design process, using Photoshop, so it will be really easy for you to un
derstand.