The Internet is rich in data. Today, it’s not a problem to find an answer to any question that may come to your mind. There are plenty of resources providing effective recommendations on how to make your life easier, how to work productively, be healthier and wealthier, etc. Moreover, the Internet can educate. This is a place where you can attain new knowledge and skills in the way and time that are convenient to you the most. There are a number of online courses that you can pass for free. For this article, we have selected the most popular and effective online courses for web designers and developers.
In addition to being absolutely free for the public access, all courses are intended for web design beginners who are eager to get new knowledge on how to build sites, personalize their layouts, expand functionality with extensions, choose a CMS on their own, and so on and so forth.
Certification Center from TemplateMonster
This is a free education project that the company launched for everyone who is eager to discover more details about the process of a website creation. Certification Center targets both web design beginners and pros. In order not to mislead the students, the world-known themes provider has divided all courses into two big groups. The first one targets those users who have little to no knowledge about web design and development. The second one is intended for more advanced users. Let’s speak about each of them in details.
The “Beginners” section is made up of a series of free educational courses that will introduce you to the web design basics. This is where you can learn how such popular CMSs as WordPress and Joomla are organized. You can also take a look under the hood of the most trending eCommerce platforms like OpenCart. Being a popular developer of ready-made website themes, TemplateMonster also shows how to handle website templates, tweak them, and expand functionality with plugins and extensions. The courses include both theoretical and practical parts. After you learn a certain block of information, you will be asked to complete a few tasks in order to check your knowledge and revise the data your have passed.
Speaking about the section for experts, TemplateMonster Certification Center welcomes all freelancers and web design studios that know how to launch sites on the basis of pre-designed themes. There is a 20-question quiz, which the participants are asked to pass. Upon a successful completion, every web design agency and freelancer will be granted with TemplateMonster Certificate as a proof of their high level of expertise in the field.
Moreover, they will become the company’s partners listed on a Web Design Studios Catalogue page. The latter is a unique opportunity to boost the public recognition and find new clients. Everyone who purchases themes from TemplateMonster has access to this chart. This is where they can look through the CMSs a web design studio works with, the number of projects those have launched, filter all web design studios by their location, etc. The integrated functionality also welcomes clients to send a website creation request via profiles pages of each freelancer/web design studio.
In such a way, with TemplateMonster Certification Center you can kill two birds with one stone – attain precious knowledge for free and boost client base while passing a quiz.
Learn CSS Layout
The LearnLayout.com site teaches CSS fundamentals that beginners need to be aware of in order to get started. Unlike the previously discussed free resource, this one targets those users who already know certain web design fundamentals and simply look for the ways to deepen and systematize their knowledge.
It is built around teaching CSS and HTML. Assuming that you are now an absolute beginner, you will be interested in looking through different information-rich slides. Get new knowledge and skills and apply those in your own works.
Alison’s Web Development
The site contains courses that cover the basics and move up to a more advanced level on different topics. Web design is one of them. The lectures are organized in a clear, easy-to-follow manner. The lecturer speaks a common language, introducing beginners to the web design fundamentals. The course is made up of 9 parts. The topics that it covers include HTML, CSS, and Adobe Dreamweaver.
Udemy
Udemy is a large online learning marketplace. It includes both free and paid courses. This is a place where you can manage the lectures on your own, decide on your own schedule and the device that you use for learning. All courses from the collection can be filtered by the skill level of a student, features they include, popularity or the “newest” status.
DevelopPHP
This online training center is intended to help you learn the basic web development languages for free. They offer a series of free video lessons on the key principles of HTML, CSS, PHP, and SQL. Programming languages are not the only topics that the site provides. Those of you who are interested in learning about graphics and Flash can also find lots of useful tutorials.
Each tutorial is divided into topics and subtopics, with all of them being complemented by a YouTube video. The most trending free online courses in web design are related to the topics of building sites on the basis of WordPress, working in Photoshop, a series of WordPress guides for beginners, etc.
Wrapping up
Free online courses can be a great start to reaching new heights and mastering a new profession. Of course, a certificate from a free online course will not bring you a dream job. However, it will give you a rock-solid foundation to move further, discover more, and develop your own skills. In case you do not plan to become a web designer in the future, free online courses will be enough to get started with your first blog or site, customize its layout or run any other task. Thus, you attain a complete freedom in your actions. Do whatever you want based on your knowledge and, who knows, maybe one day the report about your web design project will be spread all over the world.
Original post: Top 5 Free Online Courses to Learn Web Design
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