If you are new to the world of web design, you might be wondering if it is possible to learn to do it on your own, or do you need several expensive college classes to do it “right?” While it is certainly true that the process of learning how to do something well is streamlined in a college course, it is not impossible to learn web design from books and various online courses and tutorials. Quite a few successful designers have learned the basics and a few advanced techniques just from following some well-designed tutorials and courses online. But which are the best and where do you find them?

To start with, many creators of various web design tools have their own tutorials. If you want to add Javascript to your webpage, check out www.javascriptkit.com. This extensive website has many lessons on how to effectively use Javascript when designing a webpage, explanations and what works and how, as well as some pre-written code for you to copy and paste and try out on your own website for simple things like pop up boxes. The concepts range from simple to advanced, and cover pretty much any type of Javascript you might want to add to your page, as well as well explained definitions.

If you are interested in learning about many various website coding concepts, try Quackit.com’s free webmaster tutorials. This is an excellent website for a crash course in HTML coding, with a wide variety of examples as well as some pre-made code for such websites as MySpace. If you want to learn about CSS and XML, there are some brief, yet descriptive lessons on these as well, along with a section on databases and how to make use of them. This is a very concise website that covers the basics, and is a good place for a beginner to start with the various tools of web design.

However, perhaps the most extensive online tutorial website for web design of all kinds is www.w3schools.com. This website is so good that it is actually used by some college professors to enhance their own curriculums in web design instruction. This website chock full of information also includes emulators for coding in which you can apply techniques learned in lessons in an actual code that will run in the online emulator and let you know if you did it correctly. There are tutorials in HTML, CSS, DTD, Javascript and HML, with much more.

The website is so comprehensive, they have recently put out a book with all the information online that some courses are using as a textbook. However, all the information is available online. The website is essentially an online textbook and it truly the best website out there. Some of the concepts make use of definitions that might not be immediately clear to the very new beginner, but all of their lessons are meant to be easily followed and few people have reported any problems.

Whichever method you choose to learn online about web design, know that your options are wide and varied. Some options are good, some are not, but you will find that it is entirely possible to learn to code and design webpages with online tutorials, nearly as well as the experts.