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Courses on Making Professional, Usable Websites?

Posted by Cliff on from the this-is-the-real-hard-part dept.

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?"

2 of 46 comments (clear)

  1. Typography by wan-fu · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Learn typography. You'll get tons out of it because a lot of the things you'd learn that apply to print media regarding text apply to the web.

    1. Re:Typography by irontiki · · Score: 3, Interesting

      There's a lot more to type and design than is obvious to the layman.

      If you ever use the bold or the underline controls in your desktop publisher you need Robin Williams (the author not the comedian). Her books The PC is Not a Typewriter and The Non-Designer's Design Book have been of particular value to me as a geek who too often ends up designing webpages, the occasional user interface, and generating documents.

      Her complete book list