Quickest way to learning web design


Show me the way.


Youtube tutorials.


What did you call me???


A monkey’s uncle.




W3Schools will teach you the syntax so that you can create what you imagine.

Learning design and aesthetics is a whole other game. I certainly haven’t done enough reading about good design, but what I have done in the past is look at nice websites, posters, etc. and think about what works. How does the design convey the intended message? How does the layout and the colors get the information to the user in the most efficient and effective way?

When I get ideas, I like to first sketch them out on paper or a white board. Then I think about how I want elements to scale and move. Finally, I sit down and actually start typing.


Yes, it’s like the difference between learning to draw and producing art.


W3 and code academy are the best resources for learning coding. However, I would recommend Joomla! over learning to code. Joomla! is a content management system, which is kind of like a ridiculously powerful Weebly. It is used by a large amount of professional web designers.


Joomla! is nice for throwing a website up, but doesn’t really help for learning coding.

It mainly depends on what your objective is. If you want to learn website design and actually create websites from the ground up to your liking, then you’ll want to learn some web language(s) (HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc). An advantage of this is, you can probably trust your own code, and change/update it at will.

If you want to just put up a website and customize it to your liking without any in-depth knowledge of the background code, and like pretty GUI configuration, a CMS like Joomla!, WordPress, or Drupal is nice (there are other CMS alternatives too).

Alternatively, if you just want a forum and possibly a light website portal while also not requiring in-depth coding knowledge, you could use something like phpBB, vBulletin, IP Board, SMF (like this forum uses), and etc.

Back when I was hosting game servers, I preferred SMF, but I also used WordPress for a bit too. I think I even used both together, but I can’t recall exactly. Joomla! is definitely nice, but was a bit much for what I needed it to do.


I’d like to learn coding. I have a book on HTML5 and CSS3 that I’m reading. I’ll look at some YouTube videos too. I was just curious as to if anyone had any specific place or books that were particularly helpful.