Courses on Making Professional, Usable Websites?

Hagmonk asks: "I've been writing website backends in Perl, PHP, and MySQL for years now. It's always been about the functionality though, not the presentation. What I'd now like to do is offer clients a complete service - a professional backend, -and- a professionally designed front end (both from an aesthetic and usability standpoint). The thought of heading to a 'typical' website design course frightens me. I don't want to waste my time being spoonfed the very basics. I want a course that teaches me graphics manipulation, layout and usability. I want it in a strong espresso shot of a month tuition max, not spread over a lazy year. Do such courses exist? In Australia or on-line?"

Comments

Take an art course

[ObviousGuy]

Learn what your pallete is and how to work within the boundaries of it. The best website design houses are staffed not with computer programmers, but with folks with degrees in art.

If you're serious about becoming a front end designer, you ought to think seriously about getting further education and possibly a degree in art from a nearby college.

Re:Take an art course

[tverbeek]

I went back to college and picked up a BFA in design, in addition to my Comp Sci degree. If you don't have time for that, the first year's classes at many art schools will focus on the foundations of design (color, shape, line, etc.) which is probably about 75% of what you need to know.

Of course you can't just turn a geek into an artist by sending him to some classes; he needs some aptitude for it as well.

Jakob Nielsen

[martin]

He's the man on this one.

Check his web site for things like this...

http://www.useit.com/

A short course ?

[PinglePongle]

I think you may be underestimating the skill and experience a good front-end designer brings to bear on a project. Imagine somone asking "I know how to code pretty HTML and I'm a photoshop wizard, but now I want to do a 2-week course and learn servlets and database programming so I can offer the whole package".
You can absolutely look at improving your skills as a designer - someone mentioned Nielsen, you might also want to read Alan Cooper's "The inmates are running the asylum", and Joel Spolsky's book on user interface design, and maybe grab a book on general graphic design basics (colours, typography, layout) - if you have a good eye and are meticulous, that should improve the general look of your work. Just don't expect to go on a 2 week course and become a UI whizz.

Re:Train yourself

[elementik]

Actually, hit this too ( http://www.37signals.com/svn/ ) for the 37Signals Blog (Signals Vs Noise) which is a goldmine for UI discussion.

Courses on Usability and Design

[CoffeePlease]

Not necessarily in Australia, but...

The Science and Art of Effective Web and Application Design Seminar

Info Design

Online training

Online Web design courses

WebMonkey

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Lots of tutorials, some more technical than others: webmonkey. Wired said they're pulling the plug, however, so you might want to archive the site if HD space permits.

Learn design & CSS.

[oneiros27]

If you're going to take a web design class, make sure it's actually focusing on current technology, and not 4+ year old 'use a table to format your pages' crap.

For most browsers, CSS works. But it's not just about formatting the page with CSS, it's about designing your pages so that when the CSS fails, it doesn't look like a load of crap.

[I did a lot of coding in the days when <TABLE> was new, and you'd have to do some extra tricks to make sure that Mosaic and Lynx wouldn't display a bunch of run-on text.]

CSS also works rather well with

A few starting points --

• Design Graphics Magazine I'm not sure if it's still in print, but it's Australian, so they might give pointers to some user groups of interest in your area
• CSS Tutorial by W3Schools Something to get you started on CSS
• A List Apart, articles on doing tricky things with CSS
• Eric Meyer's writings. Links to articles and such by the author of ORA's CSS: The Definitive Guide. [read the Web Review articles from 2000 for some of the real power of CSS]
• Learning CSS a list of books and online resources
• Westciv courses on-line courses on CSS, CSS2 and some free resources.

Of course, knowing how to make things look good is completely different from actually doing it -- Lots of people know how to use a paint brush, but not all of our work makes it past our parent's fridges.

With a bit of reading, the average programmer should be able to at the very least, keep their pages from looking like complete crap. As always, if you see a cool website out there, look at the source, and see if you can figure out how they did it. [but just because it worked, doesn't mean that it's not a complete hack, and that it won't break in every other browser out there].

Try things. Make mistakes. Learn from them. That's the best way that I've found to improve over the years.

oh -- and don't forget -- design is design. For the most part, design concepts work in both print and on the screen. There are people who think HTML should be able to do everything they can do in a PDF, and make pages that are nothing but one big picture when they're too lazy to learn good HTML, but the design concepts are still there, even if they fail on implementation.

Re:Learn design & CSS.

[hufnmouth]

Don't forget the CSSZenGarden

Photoshop, Fonts, Templates, and Stock Images

[TaraByte]

If you know HTML and CSS really well, all you need to do is learn Photoshop. While its learning curb isn't the smallest, it is really easy to use once you get the hang of it. There are plenty of (free) online tutorials if you Google for them.

To get you started, try out designload.net, they have templates already done, which you can open up in Photoshop and play around with. Once you know how to make pretty navbars and buttons, and can find colors that don't clash with each other, you can go out and make the custom "fancy" web sites that you probably used to drool over.

Stock photos also can give a site the edge you need...if properly placed they can give your sites that "professional" edge.

web pages that suck

[cliveholloway]

web pages that suck" will give you some food for thought.

cLive ;-)

A few starting points

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I want a course that teaches me graphics manipulation, layout and usability. I want it in a strong espresso shot of a month tuition max, not spread over a lazy year. Do such courses exist?

Honestly? No. Good web design requires a wide range of skills, some general design and some more specific to the medium. It would take you far longer than a month to get to a standard where you could do it professionally, and any course claiming to teach it to you in the format you describe is almost certainly a fraud.

However, the good news is that there are a surprisingly large number of good web sites about various aspects of web design. Rather than giving lots of specific URLs, I'll mention a few keywords to start your searches below. The design community generally links well, so read a few of the top search results, and follow the links from a site you're reading to related sites on similar subjects. You'll find some themes and suggestions recur frequently; those are your basics.

Do you know the basic principles of graphic design -- contrast, alignment, repetition, proximity -- and what they mean? If not, you really need to start here.

Next up, you'll need some knowledge of how to use shape and colour. Subjects you might like to explore include:

• the emotional response evoked by simple shapes, such as rectangles, triangles, circles and stars, and by strong colours, particularly black, white and the primary colours in various schemes; note that these responses often vary with the part of the world you're in;
• choosing a colour scheme of complementary colours, and various colour wheels you can use to help identify complementary or clashing colours;
• using full colour, one or two spot colours, greyscale or pure black and white;
• making good use of whitespace.

Now that you've got some basic graphic design knowledge under your belt, you'll want to know something about typography. This is a complete subject all of its own, but at the very least, you'll need to understand the various aspects of typeface design. As with colour, you'll then need to explore how to choose fonts that work well together, and the emotional response various fonts are going to evoke. It's also important to know about legibility, particularly when you're talking about designing for the screen: a typefact that looks beautiful on paper might be hideously difficult to read on a typical 96dpi computer monitor.

Another basic skill I'd list for a graphic designer looking at web work is fluid design. On paper, you can fix the layout, make sure everything lines up nicely, choose your font sizes and graphic positions. On a web site, you can't (or rather, you probably shouldn't).

Finally, an additional skill that's much over-used but can be helpful is dynamic content, by which I mean things like DHTML, Flash and client-side scripting. As a back-end developer, I'm sure you're aware of the many uses for dynamic content on the server side, but here I'm talking about common things like menu interfaces, guidance when filling in forms, and so on.

Next up, as I'm sure you're aware from your original question, is the issue of usability. Again, this is a bit of a world unto itself: it's not what's easy to look at, it's what's easy to work with. This is perhaps the most under-rated skill of web designers, and is frequently the difference between a showy site and a really good one.

A related issue is accessibility, which is about how easily disadvantaged people such as the blind or partially-sighted can interact with your sight. Again, this is a large topic, though a little common sense and courtesy often goes a long way. Note that there are increasing legal obligations on some site designers in this respect.

Once you've done all of that, you c