These free mini-courses will give you a strong foundation in web development. Track your progress and access advanced courses on HTML/CSS, Ruby and JavaScript for free inside our student portal.
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As stated before, our goal here is to give you the best possible grounding in design fundamentals without getting too deep. We'll focus on what matters to you as a developer.
To teach you, we'll use a combination of text and demo videos with links to external websites (since there's no point in reinventing the wheel). As with the previous mini-course on Web Development Basics, there will be assignments to let you practice what you've learned and we'll finish the mini-course with a project to help you tie it all together.
We'll start by covering User Experience and how you should think user-first to build an effective site or feature. We'll look at how existing websites have succeeded and failed to implement good user experience and you'll learn how to think in terms of user goals and flows.
In the Design section, we have two goals. First, we'll help you to open your eyes to design on the web and really see it. We'll accomplish this in a similar fashion as with UX -- by walking you through the successes and failures of existing sites and giving you a chance to tackle some on your own. Second, we'll give you the tools to implement good design yourself through effective use of layout, typography and color.
Finally, we'll introduce you to the concept of mockups and how they will be used in our design and development workflow. You'll learn the Balsamiq Mockups tool through videos and demos and you will actually use it to produce several page layouts of your own.
Your learning journey certainly doesn't stop after this mini-course! Here's a reminder of how everything is structured:
Upon finishing this mini-course you may not be a designer but you should be much more comfortable working with the key elements of design to build better products and websites.
A little knowledge goes a long way and this will make you a more effective developer... let's get started!