I own several webmaster related forums (both in English and Romanian) and maybe because I am the admin and have the highest post count people consider me to be something like a “yoda” and direct the questions to me. Of course there are other members who are as good as I am in this and some are way better, but I seem to attract the questions like a huge eye-glasses wearing magnet.

One of the most important questions in many members minds is “How can I learn web design?”.

We have a lot of possible ways to learn this, there are several well known sites with articles and tutorials, there are online books and even those books we don’t read as often as before, the “real” ones with paper pages and that smell of “print” on them. There are many webmaster forums all dealing with the aspects of running a site (that would include web design too), chat rooms and blogs.

And still .. nothing beats the good ole’ practice you can do on your own.

I never would imagine learning web design and knowing what I know now just from reading and discussing. And I am so glad I didn’t waste time with a lot of planning and I just started doing something.

6 years ago I started Karate and wanted to teach the others some of the things I was also learning step by step. This meant working on a Front Page template (back then), then work it on dreamweaver, passing through the “heavy java scripts” time and the flash intros trend, animated gifs and all the jazz. And then I started learning more HTML, some CSS and working with the layers that made it possible to be able to come up with some decent designs in Photoshop.

I was able to modify that site and also learn step by step all about site design, forum management, traffic, SEO, things you can just learn in theory from the books, but you need to experiment.

Reading articles and tutorials is a great thing since you can be informed and solve all kinds of issues, the forums have been one of the best place for me to exchange ideas and ask for help, but nothing beats your own experience and your own work.

Even now, after 6 years, I can’t tell anyone “you learn web design starting from here, and then go there and there”. Web design is something hard to “define”, it’s not a map or a road, where you just see your destination and checkpoints. Web design means a lot of things and can be mastered in different ways by all people. Some people work well with following a tutorial step by step, not changing a pixel, not moving a colour. Others can’t keep themselves from experimenting and always end up with something new. There is no right or wrong in learning web design, there is no “bad way” to achieve beautiful results.

The only thing I was able to advise all my members and soon-to-be-awesome-web-designers was to “start a site” and just do it. Find a topic they love and think about a project. Try to work on that design, see how the layers look bad and try to understand what makes a design beautiful. Slice it and use tables or (even better) divs and see how horrible they look in IE as compared to FF (Internet Explorer and Firefox, for my readers who are not as familiar as I am with these “shortcuts”). Search on Google for tips of browser compatibility and then head to the SEO side. Learn how to bring in traffic, low quality traffic through all kinds of schemes and then that good quality traffic.

I can’t imagine learning web design from the books, I can’t imagine driving my car just from discussing this. Just as I have to learn how drive safely, avoid other cars, keep the car on the road and even park without destroying my wheels, I also have to open Photoshop and work on the layouts, the program I use for coding the layouts and scour the internet for new ideas of CSS effects.

If you wan to have a shot at learning web design, then you’ll just have to start … web designing

Filed under: Web development by ramona