(Teach me about) Web Design!

zee-zaz

Howdy Front Row Crew,

Recently I've been stuck in the house alot, mainly due to me waiting to go to university this october.
While sitting around and having all this free time has been fun, it's lead to me thinking, I should be doing something constructive with my time!

I chose to learn Web Design because it is something I would like to do at freelance level, maybe even working for a firm when i'm older. I'm a very design orientated person, and photoshop is basically like a third hand to me, but it is the coding side of things I have not got a grasp of yet.

I'm not backing away from this challenge, it's just a little puzzling where to actually start and what is actually necessary to learn these days. I started spoon feeding myself HTML and CSS a couple of weeks back and that's going ok, but is there a set standard of what you need to know these days within Web Design? It seems to change almost every day.

So in essence, i'm asking, what to learn and how to learn it?!

tl;dr: interested in web design, more a designer than a coder, but would like to be both.

...

Designers design, they don't code. <|:{

The easy way to learn how to write proper (x)html and css is to spend much time at <a href="http://w3schools.com/">W3Schools and follow the tutorials there. Then a good thing is to learn how to actually do various useful things (like sprite sheet graphic buttons) by Googling a lot. And of course you'll be designing and writing out a bunch of websites.

TL;DR, learn by osmosis and practice.

lackofcheese

At least with me, setting out to learn something simply doesn't work. I learn things when I need them for whatever I happen to be doing at the time.
My advice is to set some goals for yourself, and learn what you need as part of achieving these goals. Set out to make yourself a useful website, and then just do it. In the process, you'll obviously have to look up a bunch of things, and you'll want to learn what the right way is to do something, because there is often a right way and a wrong way. Learning without set goals is a sure way to get nowhere fast.

Mamath

lackofcheese is right. Start out trying to make something that you want to, preferably something simple though chances are you'll do what I tend to do and jump right into the deep end on your first attempt, and do it. If you find yourself floundering, scale back your ambitions a little. This method gives you a good look at what you don't know.