Nowadays in this digital age, having an online presence through a proper website for your business has become extremely important.

Although social media accounts are also useful for marketing and connecting with customers but websites are still important as they establish your business as a brand and give credibility to your company.

Also, a website lets Google and other search engines know about your existence and put you and your business on the online map with SEO visibility. In this article, we will be discussing about the helpful online resources which can help you to learn and design your business website quickly.

To design and develop a website and to maintain it, you will need to learn basic web programming. You should be comfortable with HTML and CSS, and should learn at least some JavaScript. Good thing is that, it is quite possible to learn how to program and design a website. There are so many resources online to help you learn web design and development. Some of these resources are free while some are paid and includes detailed articles to professional video tutorials. These resources are also recommended by top web development professionals. Here you will learn the required skills and so that you can build your business website.

First let’s check some of the benefits of online learning which revolves around saving money, easy time management, own pace, real projects and help from active communities.

• Online Education is More Affordable: Most of the courses and workshops cost hundreds or thousands of dollars but online education is much more cost effective and affordable way to learn some skills. Some of the tutorials you can get online even for free while some may charge you little money.
• Learning by Interaction with Communities: There are huge online communities which interact with each other and learn many things, concepts and skills. Learning with a community is much more fun and efficient. It is just like sitting in a class and other classmates helping you. Also you keep on learning as you are motivated by like-minded people having common goal to learn something.
• Learn at Your Own Pace: You may be doing full-time job, have a family and not much spare time. That’s why online learning can be the best bet for you to accelerate your career. You don’t need to quit the job or take the leaves to learn. Neither you need to spend your money and time commuting. Online learning gives you the freedom to spend even 1-2 hours daily after your work and family to learn web designing and development skills in order to give your career a better shape.

As you know, there are so many online resources which can help you get started and learn website design and development. This online learning industry is growing fast. You just have to take a start and push yourself to complete your skill set. For those who are eager to get started here are the top ones:-

YouTube

YouTube is one of the best and free resource to learn almost anything in 2018 including web design and development although some people may find it irrelevant. If you are a visual learner and prefer learn in this way and that for free then you might find YouTube as the best place to learn. At YouTube you can find basic learning resources and also the advanced resources for expert learners.

Treehouse

Teamtreehouse is one of the leading and most famous online learning resource. You can try their program for 7 day free trail. After that you have to pay certain monthly amount. Treehouse works by guiding you along various tracks which are there to teach you a specific skill or programming language from beginner level to advanced one. Each track has many courses having videos from an instructor alongwith structured code walkthroughs and sample quizzes to make you well informed. Treehouse has tracks which can help you with all aspects of developing websites and apps i.e from developing the most basic website with no knowledge of HTML or CSS to back-end languages and even upto iOS mobile app development.

Treehouse replicates an actual university structure as its tracks are finely structured and requires no previous knowledge. But you have to work hard to keep up with the course and complete all of the examples given. Other than this, Treehouse also gives you access to many external resources for learning including small workshops, audiovideo materials, a library of books and conferences. After you gain some experience, Treehouse also help with job offers, placements and internships which are highly beneficial for the learners.

MIT OpenCourseware

This online resource has abundance of self-guided courses from one of the best technical schools in US, MIT. The MIT Opencourseware program offers wide range of topics to learn about anything including hundreds of courses related to computer programming, development, information technology, mathematics and software engineering. Hence if you want to learn basic to advanced level of programming before diving into website development then it can be best place for you. For example, a Gentle Introduction to Programming Using Python is a great resource to get insight into that very popular and well-designed back-end programming language.

Lynda

Lynda offers numerous video courses taught by online instructors. Learning on Lynda is free for first month and after that you have to pay some monthly fee. Lynda doesn’t break things into tracks and simply gives you online access to thousands of courses which are from beginner to intermediate to advanced levels. Although Lynda has so many courses on web design and development but it also has courses on photography, animation, music, film and education. The core and most comprehensive courses from Lynda are for web design and development only. To start with, you just need to select the course you want and start learning from it.

Initially you have to make your own path but once that happen, you can find a course on just about anything which you can think of. For example, you might want to start from a basic JavaScript and then go in-depth into the fundamentals of a JavaScript library. Or it may be that first you want to learn bit of front-end development before moving into more advanced WordPress theme development. Each course has a series of videos with few examples to take you through along with some sample code. All of the instructors are highly expert as they are selected by Lynda after careful examination hence you can be sure that you will get high quality.

Usability.gov

This is a free government sponsored educational resource. It has so many how-tos, guides and tutorials for creating and enhancing the user experience for digital world. It has resource on various subjects like visual design, basics of UX, project management etc. It’s chief experience officer says that the people who want to learn about the web design should first learn more about their users before creating a non-intuitive user experience. Usability.gov provides a great resource for web developers which are interested in creating easy to use web applications and solutions.

Udemy

Udemy offers a platform to learn rather than a well structured approach for learning. On Udemy, instructors can set up their courses which can be very comprehensive and independent learning tracks which can teach you a particular skill. Udemy offers numerous course offerings in web development and other related fields. The main plus point of Udemy courses are the skills of the instructors hence you can check the instructor’s credentials and skills before starting a course on Udemy to get more confidence.

Udemy is more like a skill-driven website and you can get started with a particular skill like HTML5 or CSS rather than learning from a start to finish courses. Udemy provides so many courses on all topics related to web development, from the basics of code to building a full fledged website using HTML, CSS, JavaScript and even WordPress CMS. Right now Udemy has over 65,000 online courses and they are charged at affordable rates.

Codeacademy

Cadeacademy is a popular course-based online learning site. It has a different approach for learning. The basic version of Codeacademy is free although it also offers a pro version which has some monthly fee and you will also get technical support in that. In place of offering videos to learn from, you are walked through interactive examples which will teach you coding right from the start. There are many examples to tell about a particular programming language like PHP, HTML or CSS and through these examples you can easily learn about the code’s structure and semantics of that particular programming language. Sample codes are provided to teach typing the code right in the browser. After that your code are evaluated by the platform quickly and you are also given explanations and walkthroughs.

WPSessions

WPSessions website is a online learning resource which is focused on WordPress learning. This website was started by a WordPress expert Brain Richards and offers group of video tutorials which are organized into sessions. Some of the sessions are free while some of paid and each of them focuses on a new topic in web development. For example “Mastering WordPress troubleshooting” session deals exclusive in how to become master of WordPress troubleshooting. Although this site is more focused on WordPress but it has many sessions which take you through the basics of web development before telling you about how they apply to WordPress. For example, a course “WordPress and Backbone.js” teaches about the fundamentals of JavaScript before telling about how to get started with the Backbone JavaScript library.

Tuts Plus

Envato Tuts+ offers two different ways for learning. This website has numerous free tutorials which focuses on how to get started with a specific JavaScript library or the CSS fundamentals. For beginners these tutorials are great assets when they are just starting out as they have many code samples to offer to take you step by step through the process of developing a website. If you want to quickly start learning then Tuts Plus tutorials are best for you. It also has numerous HTML, CSS, JavaScript and WordPress tutorials. Good thing about Tuts Plus is that it focuses on web development i.e about design, front-end as well as back-end. This online resource takes you to deep web development skill or programming language and is one of the best learning resource which evaluates and shows how to use various libraries like Backbone, Laravel, Ember etc. Although for a beginner Tuts Plus may appears to be a bit advanced. This website starts from the beginning level and goes up from there. But if you are really trying to expand your basic knowledge and want to develop really cool websites then Tuts Plus is the best resource for you.

Khan Academy

Khan Academy was founded in 2006 and since then it has grown into a large non-profit online education platform offering free courses in a range of topics and subjects. It’s main focus is on Math and Science. Each of the course has a series of videos which can help you to learn a new skill and related challenges to guide you along. The web development section of Khan Academy is new and right now focuses mainly on how to use JavaScript. Hence for learning HTML and CSS you can look at some other site although it offers a great and free way to get started with JavaScript. Khan Academy is in the process of building their web development section hence in future it can be one of the best resource to learn web development for free.

HTML Dog

HTML Dog is a free website which is designed to help you learn all about the web design. It has great guides for HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The beginner level tutorials assume that you don’t know anything about coding hence making it a best resource for those who want to grasp the basic concepts of web design. It has mainly written articles and tutorials with few visuals without any interactivity.

W3schools

W3schools is a free resource for aspiring web developers which includes introduction to HTML, CSS, JavaScript and many other programming languages and also step by step tutorials for specific additions to your website including navigation bars, dropdown menus, animated buttons, search tools etc. W3schools is a great reference guide which lists HTML tags, CSS properties and also a HTML color wheel.

Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow website is a completely free and one of the best resource to just browse or search anything about web design and development and other related topics and start learning it. The resources out there on this site are useful for designers, developers as well as other users. Just visit the site and start learning easily.

CSS Tricks

CSS Tricks is very popular among web developers as a place to learn. They learn many things on it by checking out tips on CSS Tricks and following the examples. CSS Tricks is a repository of knowledge about CSS, HTML and JavaScript which over the years has become a complete tool for learning front-end development. Here you can find lots of quick and practical tips, code snippets and basic explanations of complex techniques. New tutorials are added every week. CSS Tricks is a great resource to find a solution to a problem if you stuck somewhere during your web development.

Eloquent JavaScript

This is a book which can help you a lot in JavaScript programming. Recently its third edition has been released. The online book walks you through JavaScript, from basic fundamentals to advanced server-side application development. This book is free and each chapter has many code examples which can run right from the browser. If you really want to get started with JavaScript then it is one of the best resource.

Conclusion

We have just given you the best online resources for learning website design and development. Most of these resources are free and have so many tutorials, articles and code snippets to give you the basic, advanced as well as practical aspects of web development. Some of these resources also has extensive list of video tutorials to give you more interactive ways to learn about web design and development. Some of these resources are also good if you want to go deep into learning programming. Although some of these resources also offer paid tutorials but that’s upto you only. Now as you have many choices hence you can select the best resources to learn anything about web design and development for free or at most affordable rates.