All the resources you need to learn web design and development can be found online, but it’s easy to get overwhelmed with a number of YouTube videos to watch, a lot of articles to read and millions of courses to buy. So, we’ve hand-picked the best 15 web design and development tutorials that you can find on the web. If you pick some of them and put in the time to practice, you’ll be surprised how much you can learn and achieve finally.
With the Website Builder, you are able to add images and videos to your website with one click of a button. The widgets are relatively easy to use and configuring custom borders, padding, and colors around your elements are done in seconds. Adding text, images, buttons, icons, tabs, menus, sliders, videos, tables, charts is as simple as dragging the element from the widget panel and dropping it wherever you feel its place on your website should be.
Terrific visuals make a website more beautiful. It’s science. With image galleries, you can display a variety of visuals and enrich your website’s look and feel. This tutorial shows you exactly how to add an image gallery to your website, as well as how to customize the gallery outline to match your overall site design. The large selection of gallery layouts means there’s something for everyone – whether you’re a professional photographer or a personal trainer.
Overall SquareSpace is a high quality website builder that comes with a variety of modern templates to choose from. The builder interface takes a few minutes to get accustomed to, but once you do it is intuitive and easy to use. The only real downside is the price. You won’t be disappointed with your website design, but you can make an equally great site with Wix while paying less. I basically look at SquareSpace as a more expensive version of Wix.
This brings us to the topic of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Now, I’m going to be honest – SEO can be a complex business. After all, we’re talking about trying to make our websites look good to a mindbogglingly complicated algorithm, which has details that Google keeps closely guarded. Oh, and of course, millions upon millions of other sites are trying to do the same thing.
Full Disclaimer: If you choose to use the domain and hosting option I recommend in this tutorial and click my links to get to it, I’ll earn a commission (though there is no extra cost to you – it will actually be quite a bit cheaper since I’m able to offer a coupon code). I want to be very clear that there are definitely other good choices for your domain and hosting out there. This is simply the one I’ve been using since the beginning, and I’m very satisfied. If you do choose to use my link, thank you!
Your template is really just a starting point for your new website. You can also add other elements to the page to really make the site look complete. On the sidebar, click the “add” button to bring up a list of potential page elements you can add to your site. You might choose to add things like text boxes, images, slideshows, buttons, menus, videos or shapes. When you click on one of those elements from the menu, you can see a few different options for the type of style you want to add to your site. Then you can add and move around different elements to make everything look exactly the way you want it.
Another potential problem is the quality of free plugins and themes. While most are good and have fairly high security standards, you’d should be wary of unknown third party plugins. WordPress is a secure platform out the box, but adding third party software while exercising poor judgement is a bad idea. That being said security vulnerabilities are generally fixed as soon as they are detected.
Strong Community & Open Source: It is free and used by a lot of people. There are a plethora of free themes and plugins that you can leverage for your site. Apart from the freebies, premium themes and plugins are cheap and come with excellent support services from their providers. If you ever have a doubt or a problem a simple Google search can answer your query. If fact, I’ll go so far as to say you’ll find the answer to your doubts answered by the first three results of a Google search. A strong community will aid in your WordPress initiation process should you ever encounter any hiccups. And you can always drop your comments here either Aigars or me will be sure to respond to the at the earliest opportunity.
I had heard of most of the other website builders I reviewed before, but SiteBuilder was a new one for me. That lack of name-recognition along with their lower price point had me expecting a poor performance, so I was pleasantly surprised to find a full-featured website builder with a decent template selection. If you just want to get some sort of website up and aren’t too picky on design then this may be the website builder for you.
Overall this was my favorite website builder, and the main reasons were how easy it was to use along with having the most modern template selection. If you want to change something on your site just click on it and options come up to edit text, drag- and-drop, change background images, etc. There are also helpful tutorials that pop-up right inside the builder, so if you are struggling to figure something out there is help right there, which means you won’t have to contact customer service for every little thing.
Once you’re cool with the front-end languages, you’ll then melt your brain-bits with highly advanced skills like Responsive Websites, PHP, MySQL, WordPress and custom WordPress plugin development. You’ll then have the ability to build responsive, dynamic websites and blogs, basic eCommerce sites and online stores, and have a professional understanding of all aspects of web design & development.
Once you have an overview of your website plan/sitemap, you can drill down to the specifics of the content you need to create for a website launch. It will be important to create evergreen content (content that will not be changing much and will appear on the static pages) and also important to have fresh content appearing on your website on a regular basis.
If you study my current site, you’ll see that most of my main sections link out to other places on the web – my YouTube channel, my podcasts, the speaking page here on College Info Geek, etc. This is a strategic decision – as a professional YouTuber/writer, those are the best places for me to be directing people, since I benefit from people subscribing to my content rather than evaluating it.
So based on your site’s niche and your expertise, you need to produce content that genuinely offers value to would be readers. If you intend to create your site purely for monetary purposes, it will not be successful in the long run. No wait a minute, it may still be profitable but certainly not as successful as it could have been had you tried to genuinely help your audiences. So focus on good content.
Are you ready for the mobile era? No website should go on the air without a mobile version these days. Mobile web use is rapidly increasing and is already surpassing usage from desktops and laptops. If you want to stick to the program and make sure you are not missing out on mobile traffic, follow the steps in this tutorial and learn how to set up the mobile version of your site.