How to Learn Web Design Online – Free Courses and Tutorials

There is no shortage of resources online for the novice web designer. New tutorials and courses appear every day on the topics of creating and designing websites. There are plenty of websites and blogs dedicated entirely to educating people in the field of web design, and programming languages such as CSS, HTML, PHP and Javascript. Finding good resources is a daunting task though. This is why we are providing this list of places online where new website designers and web developers can learn everything there is to know about web design.

If you are intent on learning on your own, one thing we recommend is creating a blog. Write articles and tutorials on the topic of web design and development. This will help you put into practice the things you have learned. You will steadily gain more confidence for designing websites, and gain feedback from others in the web design field. A blog can also be a great way of getting a head start on an online design business.

Before we move on, you may be interested in this article: Web Design Trends 2014

Places to Learn Web Design for Free Online

W3Schools

W3Scools is a completely free way to learn Javascript, PHP, HTML, CSS and more online and at your own pace. If you want the certificate though, you will have to pay. Tutorials are very easy to understand and follow along. W3Schools even allows users to experiment with coding onsite, to see the effect of certain markup.
Webydo – No Code Website Building

Webydo is an online studio for web designers where they can learn how to design websites without emphasis on coding.

This is a great way to learn to practice web designing, especially if you have little knowledge of PHP, CSS, HTML and other programming languages.
P2PU School of Webcraft

At the School of Webcraft from Mozilla, you can take free web design courses, and learn everything about CSS, PHP, HTML and more.

They have Challenge Sets to make learning website creation more fun.

Courses range from learning HTML to hosting websites and are available in various languages.
Netmagazine.com

Check out the tutorial section to find lots of free tutorials on web design, including HTML, jQuery, CSS, PHP, Photoshop and more.

You will find hundreds of tutorials, such as creating HTML5 animations, CSS transitions, Photoshop graphics, parallax scrolling, and much more.
Webdesign.tutsplus.com

Webdesigntuts+ has many tutorials on the topics of web development and web design, all for free. Find articles on designing apps, ecommerce, HTML, CSS, typography, site elements, workgflow and much more. There are also other tuts+ sites such as PSD Tuts with tutorials for Photoshop, and WP Tuts has tutorials for Wordpress.
StackOverflow

This is a free forum for novice and professional web designers where they can go to get answers to designing problems, and get advice from qualified professionals.
Udacity.com

Udacity offers free web design courses from University of Virginia and Stanford. Courses have to be enrolled in, instead of being readily available online. Take free courses such as web development, mobile web development, HTML5 game development, interactive 3D graphics and much more.
CSS-Tricks.com

CSS Tricks is a blog created by Chris Coyier, and has hundreds of tutorials on advanced techniques with CSS. It has a forum for web designers, tutorials, video lessons, snippets and much more.