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Canva for Beginners: Create Professional Designs

Learn the ins and outs of canva while designing your own style guide and web page.

Creation of a Professional Website with WordPress

Create your own website without any programming by using simple plugins on wordpress.

Creation of an Online Shop with Shopify

Get started in the world of e-commerce with the sector's top platform.

HTML, CSS and JavaScript for Beginners

Learn the fundamentals of creative web design to build interactive sites from scratch using html, css, and javascript.

No-Code Web Design with Elementor and Wordpress

Learn to design creative websites and personalized portfolios without needing to code using wordpress and the elementor visual editor.

Introduction to UX Design

Learn how to create digital experiences that resonate with your users.

Introduction to Responsive Web Development with HTML and CSS

Learn the basics of front-end web development.

Web Design with Figma: Building Striking Compositions

Learn the principles behind creating strong digital compositions that take your designs to the next level.

Design Systems for Websites using Figma

Learn how to build design systems for visually appealing websites using figma and maximize your workflow..

Portfolio Design with Figma: Self-Promotion for Creatives

Build a digital portfolio with figma that showcases your creative work and attracts your dream projects.

Introduction to JavaScript Programming

Get started with essential programming language to create interactive websites.

Design, Development, and Launch of a Website

Learn the complete process behind creating and publishing a website using html, css, and javascript.

Creation of an Online WordPress Store

Learn how to easily create and configure an online store using free software like wordpress.org and woocommerce.

UX UI Design for Landing Pages: Tell an Original Story

Learn the ins and outs of figma to create a landing page that connects with users through storytelling.

Creative Coding: Immersive Art with openFrameworks

Learn the basics of c++ programming and creative coding to animate striking shapes and loops for immersive artistic installations.

Designing Interactive Web Pages with Figma

Learn to design interactive, eye-catching, and easy-to-program web pages based on user behavior.

Creative Web Design: Planning and Coding from Scratch

Learn how to design and build an engaging website using html, css and javascript.

Introduction to UI Design

Learn the principles of interface design to start your career as a ui designer.

Enjoy 2 months of free hosting with an annual WordPress plan. 30-day money-back guarantee.

20 Best Web Design Courses Online (Free and Paid)

Between dozens of learning platforms, hundreds of blogs, and YouTube, there’s an endless amount of web design courses and learning materials available online.

But it’s not all of the same quality. If you start in the wrong place, you’ll end up wasting your time and money.

We’ve scoured the web for the very best, and most up-to-date web design courses, both free and paid, and compiled a shortlist of the best options. We’ve got you covered too, if you are looking for the best web development tools in 2024.

So if commuting to the office every morning and suffering through the afternoon rush on the way home every day isn’t your thing, keep reading.

We’ll cover all the courses you need to kickstart your new career as a web designer.

What Qualifications Are Needed to Be a Web Designer?

In web design , traditional hard qualifications like university degrees don’t carry as much weight as in other industries.

It’s a rapidly changing industry, so a 10-year old degree doesn’t mean you’re a great web designer today.

Instead, web designers are typically judged by their catalog of recent work showcased through their portfolio site .

And it’s not just the previous projects in your portfolio that help highlight your skills.

You can convince potential clients you have the necessary design and development skills with the site itself.

To get inspired by real portfolio sites using cutting-edge elements of frontend design and development, you can examine previous award-winning projects on Awwwards .

Look at how each designer uses typography , white space, animations, icons, and other design elements to put their best foot forward.

You can also find inspiration in other creative communities like Dribble or Behance.

Master Necessary Tools and Soft Skills for Success

There are also a number of tools that you need to master, and soft skills that will make or break your career as a web designer.

Let’s start by taking a look at some of the tools you might use.

• Basic illustration and photo editing tools:  Illustrator, Photoshop, Sketch, or GIMP.
• Interaction design tools: Adobe XD or Invision Studio.
• Local dev environment (if you develop prototypes or work with a CMS ): DesktopServer, XAMPP, etc. (Learn how to install WordPress locally  for testing new designs.)

There are also a number of popular frameworks and CSS that can help you stand out.

• Animation kits : Animate.css, Bounce.js, and more.
• jQuery libraries and plugins:  Lazy load, parallax scrolling, and more.
• Familiarity with Bootstrap, React, and other popular frameworks for frontend development is crucial.
• Knowing WordPress and how to create a template can also be a key selling point for potential clients who work with the CMS .

You will also need a number of soft skills if you want to succeed.

• An understanding of consumer psychology and human behavior on websites. Basic concepts include decision paralysis, the value of social proof, and color psychology.
• As a freelancer, you need to learn how to price projects and use basic negotiation tactics.
• You also need to learn how to create proposals and land a client. This is a valuable skill even within an agency or company setting .

20 Best Online Web Design Courses (Free vs Paid)

Below, we’re going to highlight some of the very best online web design courses, available both as free and paid resources.

To help you find what you’re looking for faster, we’ve separated them into the following categories.

Free Online Web Design Video Courses

If you prefer to learn through the video format, with someone guiding you through each new piece of code or technique, there are many free options available online.

1. WebFlow University: Ultimate Web Design Course

Ultimate Web Design Course  is a free course offered by WebFlow university, an online learning platform hosted and developed by the CMS and design tool WebFlow.

It includes over 5 hours of video lessons and is a great introduction to all things web design.

• HTML & CSS basics
• Web structure
• Media elements
• Styling basics
• Layout basics
• Advanced layouts
• Responsive design
• CMS & dynamic content

Length: 5 hours (of video)

Certificate: Not available

• Up-to-date cutting edge introduction to web design.
• Easy to follow instructions.
• Over 5 hours of video content (much longer actual learning if you go along).
• While a good crash course, it doesn’t give you the best foundational understanding of all the concepts.

2. BYOL: Beginner Web Design Using HTML5, CSS3 & Visual Studio Code

Web designer and YouTuber Bring Your Own Laptop has created a free 4-hour course called Beginner Web Design using HTML5, CSS3 & Visual Studio Code .

The format is a single 4-hour video on YouTube, complete with a bundle of exercise files freely downloadable.

Throughout the course, you will learn how to create three different websites with increasing levels of complexity and difficulty, and finally, how to make your site responsive.

• Head and HTML tags
• CSS classes
• Web structure and div nesting
• External CSS
• Testing your website

Length: 4 Hours (of video)

• Entertaining and digestible instructions (most YouTube comments highlight how easy it is to follow along).
• Almost 4 hours of video content available on YouTube for free, divided into sections for a better overview.
• Quite basic, to follow the complete course (16 hours) you need to sign up for a Bring Your Own Laptop membership for $12/month.

3. freeCodeCamp: Introduction To Responsive Web Design – HTML & CSS Tutorial

In 2019, freeCodeCamp released a 4-hour introductory course  to responsive design on their YouTube channel.

The course will teach you how to create a single, 3-page responsive website, as well as the basics of responsive design, CSS, and HTML5.

• Responsive design basics
• Mobile-first design
• Em vs px vs rems
• Responsive containers
• Media queries
• Responsive navigation
• Page structure

Length: 4 Hours (of video)

• Get a deeper understanding of how to create a proper responsive design with HTML and CSS in 2024.
• Get to know important CSS units and advanced HTML tags.
• Over 4-hours of neatly-divided video available for free (no signup) on YouTube .
• Limited foundational information beyond responsive design (good if you already know basic HTML and CSS).

4. OpenClassrooms Course: Build Your First Web Pages With HTML and CSS

OpenClassrooms offer a free introductory course called Build Your First Web Pages with HTML and CSS .

It starts from the very beginning and will give you a great fundamental understanding of both HTML5 and CSS3. If you have no experience whatsoever with web development or design, this is a good place to start.

• HTML5 and CSS3 basics
• HTML structure
• CSS styling
• Page structure and SEO
• Image optimization
• Block and inline elements
• Color theory
• Fonts (Make sure to check our guide on how to change fonts in WordPress )

Length: 10 hours

Certificate: Available (with a $20/month membership)

• Great introduction to web design, using the latest in HTML and CSS.
• Collection of Codepen entries to highlight how different code works in the real world.
• 10 hours of free learning, including interactive quizzes and video lessons.
• Stops at the very basic, giving you a limited, surface-level understanding of many different concepts.

Paid Online Web Design Video Courses

If you have the money to invest, there are also a number of high-quality paid courses on web design available online worth looking at. If you’re planning to make it a career, investing in your education should be a no-brainer.

5. Udemy Course: Web Design for Beginners: Real World Coding in HTML & CSS

Udemy is one of the most popular premium learning platforms online. There are courses available on everything from website design to freelancing and productivity.

But the best place to start is the Web Design for Beginners: Real World Coding in HTML & CSS  online course.

• HTML layout and essentials
• Fonts and typography
• CSS essentials
• Backgrounds
• CSS3 animations
• JavaScript frameworks

Length: 11 hours (of video)

Price: $16.99 (The $100+ price is a sales tactic)

Certificate: Available

• Well-structured introductory course that covers all the basics of responsive design in 2024.
• Up-to-date information (last updated in July 2020).
• Interact with a community and ask the course instructor questions.
• One-time fee (rather than monthly payments).
• For a paid course, it’s not the most in-depth course available.

6. TreeHouse: Web Design Track

TreeHouse is a subscription-based online learning platform suitable for both designers and programmers. The web design track  offers 43 hours of video and interactive lessons on HTML, CSS, layouts, and other web design basics.

It also includes basic skills for a budding graphic designer, like an SVG tutorial.

• Web design process
• Advanced HTML forms
• CSS layouts
• Bootstrap 4
• Wireframing
• CSS animations
• CSS grid layout

Length: 43 hours (of video)

Price:   $25/month for courses and $49/month for courses plus.

Certificate: Not available for tracks (only available for the $199/month Techdegree programs).

• Great in-depth introduction to web design with over forty hours of interactive learning.
• An active community that you can interact with and learn from.
• Set up a solid foundation with over 15 hours of learning on HTML and CSS basics alone.
• If you work a full-time job and have little free time, TreeHouse could become expensive if you keep delaying your study.

7. Frontend Masters: CSS Grids/Flexbox Course

Frontend Masters  is a great learning platform for beginners and intermediate web designers alike. This course will teach you exactly how to use modern CSS techniques to create a responsive layout for your website.

It will help you bridge the gap between a basic HTML wireframe designer and someone who can create functional prototypes and templates.

• Flexbox basics and implementation
• Responsive images
• CSS grid basics and implementation

Length: 5+ hours (of video)

Price: $39/month

• Stellar video lessons from a top-class professional design educator.
• Will teach you how modern responsive design works, which is a must even for wireframe and layout designers.
• FM has other great courses to learn fundamental web design and development basics.
• As with other online courses, it can become a little expensive if you need more time (months add up quickly).

8. Skillcrush: Frontend Development Course

Skillcrush  offers an in-depth introductory course to frontend development, perfect for beginners. Its price and timeline mean it has more in common with some of the more standard MOOCs, but the structure is free format, and you can learn as fast as you want.

• HTML, CSS, and JS basics
• Media queries and responsive design
• Git & GitHub

Length: 3 months (average time to completion )

Price: $549 one-time payment or $199/month for three months

• Great in-depth introduction to frontend development and web design as a whole.
• Learn from example as you can watch how other students completed assignments.
• It’s a bit on the expensive side and the refund policy seems a bit weak.

9. Envato Tuts+: Responsive Web Design for Beginners

The Tuts+ responsive web design course  for beginners is a quick introduction to the basics of responsive design, HTML, CSS, media queries, and more.

Alone it might not seem like the best paid choice, as it taps out at just over 3 hours. But Tuts+ premium includes 20+ courses on web design, from using specific software like Sketch or Adobe XD, to an in-depth course on web typography.

• Grid layout

Length: 3 hours (video )

Price: $16.50/month

Certificate: N/a

• Learn how to use design software like Adobe XD and Sketch from other courses.
• Learn cutting edge CSS & HTML tricks from dedicated courses.
• Get access to millions of stock photos, web templates, and more with the same membership.
• Their introductory course itself is basic and slightly dated.

10. Paul Boag – Encouraging Clicks Masterclass

Paul Boag is a leading educator and author in the space of conversion optimization and UX design. He’s written multiple books on web and UX design for Smashing Magazine and is a recurring columnist for many leading web design publications.

His “ Encouraging Clicks Masterclass ” is an assisted video course where you get direct access to ask Paul himself throughout the course. You will learn the basics of designing websites that drive actions and conversions, without resorting to shady tricks or dark patterns .

• Basics of conversion optimization
• Measuring the right metrics
• Basic consumer psychology and how to take advantage of it with design choices
• Creating better calls to action
• A/B testing & ongoing optimization

Length: 4 hours and 30 minutes of video

Price: $267 one-time fee

• Learn how to create designs that boost conversions for your clients.
• Only opens a few times per year.

Online University Web Design Programs & Degrees (MOOC)

Through massive online open courses (MOOC) platforms like Coursera, some universities offer their full web design curriculum online for free.

Not all courses are equal, however, so we’re only highlighting the cream of the crop.

11. Coursera: Web Design for Everybody: Basics of Web Development & Coding Specialization

Web Design for Everybody  by the University of Michigan is one of the most popular development courses on Coursera.

It covers the basics of HTML, CSS, and JS, as well as responsive web design and web accessibility.

If you don’t need or want the certification or credits, you can audit the course for free.

• Web development
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) basics
• HTML5 basics
• JavaScript basics
• Responsive web design
• Web accessibility
• Document Object Model (DOM)

Length: 70 hours of learning (including reviews and experiments).

Price:  Free to audit course.

Certificate: $49/month membership required to get the certificate.

• Great for developing a solid foundation as a web designer, with over 30 hours of learning on HTML, JS, and CSS basics.
• Interact with a thriving online community of other eager learners.
• Complete reviews, experiments, and more to better internalize everything you learn.
• Few complaints about the learning material being sub-par (typos, errors in the quizzes, etc.)

12. EdX: W3CX Frontend Developer Program

The W3CX Frontend Developer Program  from edX is perfect for absolute beginners who want to build solid fundamentals in all the core languages of frontend development.

• Advanced responsive design, CSS grid, and flexbox
• Modern HTML5 APIs like timed text track, and device orientation

Length: 140 hours of learning (including reviews and experiments).

Price:   Free to audit individual courses independently.

Certificate: $895.50 one-time fee required to get the certificate.

• Extremely in-depth information straight from the source (W3C).
• Instructors are highly-qualified developers working at Microsoft.
• Interactive with an active online community to get help and learn collectively.
• The latter half of the course is more focused on web application development.

13. Udacity: Frontend Development Nanodegree

The Udacity frontend web development nanodegree  will teach you the fundamentals of HTML, CSS, and responsive web design, plus much more.

While not technically a university offering, the structure, format, educational depth, and price of a Udacity nanodegree are in line with standard MOOC programs.

• Create a dynamic landing page for marketing content
• Modern web APIs
• Automate repetitive tasks with Webpack and other workflow tools

Length: 100+ hours of learning (including reviews and experiments).

Price:   $1356 one-time fee for 4-month access, or $399/month

Certificate: Available with the nanodegree price.

• Includes professional project and assignment reviews and feedback.
• Interact with dedicated technical mentors.
• Get real 1-on-1 advice from a personal career coach towards the end of the degree.
• Free learning is limited to a 7-day free trial.

14. Future Learn: User Experience (UX) Design and Research

The User Design and Research  program from Future Learn and the University of Michigan is perfect for aspiring web designers who want to learn more about UX design.

• Design heuristics
• User experience research basics (UX interviews, survey protocols, data extraction)
• Affinity walls
• Design process & prototyping
• Implementing data-driven UX design

Length: 88 hours of learning (including reviews and experiments).

Price:   Free to audit the individual courses

Certificate: $345 one-time fee required to get the certificate and lifetime access to each course.

• Great course to develop a better understanding of how users interact with websites and apps.
• Can use the skills to offer more comprehensive services, beyond a basic website design.
• Not a course specifically tailored for web design.

15. OpenHPI: Human-Centered Design Course

If you want to improve your design fundamentals, this course on human-centered design  is a great place to start.

It can help you improve your ideation and research skills, giving you a stronger toolbox to work with as a web designer.

• Defining goals

Length: 10-11 hours of learning (including reviews and experiments).

Price:   Free

Certificate: Basic certificate of completion available.

• Great course to quickly (in 10 hours) build your fundamental skill set as a designer.
• Can use the concepts beyond the realms of web design.
• Doesn’t cover web design directly.

Interactive Web Design Courses

If you’re trying to learn more frontend development and hands-on coding than the graphic design elements, there are a number of interactive web design courses online.

16. Free: freeCodeCamp

freeCodeCamp  offers a mammoth course on responsive website design, with over 300 hours of learning available for free.

The interface, while a little drab, is intuitive and gamifies the experience of learning code.

To continue through the course, you must put every piece of new information into practice, which is great for retention.

• Applied visual design

Length: 300+ hours of interactive lessons.

Certificate: Available (free)

• Great foundational information.
• Learn at your own pace.
• Retain information better by instantly using every piece of code you learn.
• The learning interface isn’t the most appealing.

17. Free: W3Schools

W3Schools  is one of the largest resources available for learning web development online.

It has hundreds of hours of tutorials and courses on the core languages and frameworks used to build the web.

The interface can be a bit clunky, but the incredible volume of high-quality free lessons make up for that. You don’t even need to sign up with your email to get started.

• HTML5, JavaScript, CSS3 basics
• Canvas and SVG

Length: Hundreds of hours of interactive lessons.

Certificate: Available (from $95 per language).

• Great foundational information on all languages.
• Learn-as-you-go by browsing the massive catalog while building your first site.
• No email signup required.
• The learning interface is not as smooth as other interactive courses.

18. Free: Codecademy

Codecademy is an interactive learning platform for coders and web designers. It offers a few courses  for free that will help you get started.

It has an awesome gamified interface that makes learning new code a breeze.

Unfortunately, the content in the free plan is quite limited, focusing only on the basic languages and creating a simple website.

• How to create your first website

Length: 10-20 hours of interactive lessons.

Price:   basic courses free (paid version below)

• Great learning interface.
• Active and engaging community for learning.
• Free courses are very limited.

19. Paid version: Codecademy Pro

With Codecademy Pro, you get the platform and community included in the free plan, plus full access to all courses and the web development path .

You can also take shorter skill paths like learning how to build websites.

With the pro version, you get access to hundreds of hours of interactive lessons and a certificate at the end of courses.

Price:   $39.99/month ($19.99/month billed yearly).

20. Free: Dash by General Assembly

General Assembly is primarily a campus or in-person bootcamp-based educational company for designers and programmers.

But their free interactive online course Dash  is a great way to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript basics, all while you are actively designing and creating your own website from scratch.

• HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript basics
• Images and media
• Creating a basic interactive game with JS

Length: 10+ hours of interactive lessons

• Great foundational information on the languages of frontend development.
• Retain information better by instantly using every concept and line of code you learn.
• Limited amount of information contained in the free course (paid options start at $3,950).

Web Design Business Courses vs Web Design with WordPress

WordPress’ current market share is +38% of all websites on the internet. As a result, there is almost as large a marketplace for WordPress sites and the related development skills, as general frontend developers .

Specializing in WordPress can help you get established and build your portfolio quickly. But you can’t just jump into it with basic web design skills.

Necessary Skills as a WordPress Designer/Developer

First off, you need the ability to edit/create WordPress themes. That means you need a clear understanding of how WordPress works, and WordPress development basics:

• The Loop (the basic PHP function that displays WordPress posts and page content)
• The Gutenberg block editor  (and how the blocks are displayed on a live WP site)
• WordPress template hierarchy (which page templates you need to edit and how to create child themes
• CSS specificity (how to correctly tweak and override CSS )

You also need:

• Mastery of HTML and CSS and web design fundamentals
• A basic understanding of PHP
• The ability to work with popular page builders (Elementor, Divi, etc.)
• Familiarity with popular themes

To help you develop these skills, check out our dedicated guide on 13 places to learn WordPress online .

From YouTube to paid and free learning platforms for coders, to online university courses, there’s something for everyone. Though not universal across the board, the information in free web design courses can  be more dated than paid alternatives.

This is simply because the money from the members or students offers the budget for educators to update their curriculum and videos.

Paid web design courses also often give you the opportunity to interact with instructors, and not just other students.

There’s no need to waste time with a course or instructor you don’t vibe with. Pick the web design course that sounds right for your current level and your goals, and stick to it.

The perfect tools for training and developing your skills as a web designer are out there.

Now it’s your turn: did you take any course to improve your web design skills? How was your experience? Share it in the comments!

Head of Content at Kinsta and Content Marketing Consultant for WordPress plugin developers. Connect with Matteo on Twitter .

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Are there any learning platforms to become specialized in wordpress

There are a few great places you can learn WordPress see more here https://kinsta.com/blog/learn-wordpress/

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17 Best Online Courses for Web Design

• Matan Naveh
• on Web Design
• Updated on: 14.06.22

Web design is a rapidly changing environment — new techniques and technologies are constantly emerging, and as a web designer or developer , you have to be constantly learning to keep up.

When it comes to education, web designers don’t have a shortage of online and offline courses. But there is one thing that makes online education great — it lets you learn at your own pace.

In this article, we’ve decided to create an overview of the best online web design courses you should consider. We’ve listed the courses in the context of educational platforms because you are likely to try other classes while you’re already on the site. So it’s vital to know what each platform is capable of.

Table Of Contents

1. coursera, 3. linkedin learning, 4. skillshare, 5. treehouse, 8. freecodecamp, 9. pluralsight, 10. interaction design foundation, 11. thinkful, 12. brainstation, 13. designlab, 14. skillcrush, 15. general assembly, 16. futurelearn, 17. envato tuts+.

About the Platform​

Coursera is a platform that doesn’t require any introduction. It gives you access to online courses covering almost anything you can think of. Coursera provides a nice filtering mechanism that allows you to tailor the options according to your preferences (define a level of proficiency, educational institute, or type of program).

What It Offers For Web Designers

Coursera offers more than 250 courses for web specialists. Most of the courses are focused on beginner and intermediate levels. The courses are created in partnership with educational institutes, so it’s possible to get a certificate after completion. Many courses are available in multiple languages.

Per course. Most courses are available for free enrollment, so you pay only for the certificate. 

• Each course has information about the expected time of completion (e.g. “Approx. 13 hours to complete; Suggested: 5 weeks, 2-3 hours per week”).
• Many courses are created in collaboration with famous academic institutes.
• Many courses are available for free.
• Coursera isn’t explicitly focused on web design and development.

Recommended Courses

Web design for everybody: basics of web development & coding specialization.

Skill level: Beginners

Estimated time:  Three months to complete this course

Price: Free enrollment

You will learn how to design and create websites, and be able to build a responsive, accessible, web portfolio using HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. During the capstone, you will design a web portfolio demonstrating your growth as a web developer and your knowledge of accessible web design.

What you will learn:

• Basics of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS3)
• How to add interactivity to web pages with Javascript
• How to apply responsive design to enable a page to be viewed on various devices

Web Design: Strategy and Information Architecture

Skill level: Intermediate

Estimated time: Approximately 24 hours to complete this course

This course is focused on the user’s initial experience while coping with the challenges of research, planning, setting goals, understanding the user, structuring content, and developing interactive sequences. In this course, you will also complete a large-scale project — developing a comprehensive plan for a complex website.

What you’ll learn:

• How to determine a strategy for web design
• How to outline a scope for design
• How to design sitemaps

edX was founded by Harvard and MIT and has become a home to more than 20 million learners. The platform provides the highest-quality learning experiences in various fields, including web design.

edX offers various courses for web developers, ranging from general web design to relatively niche areas such as web development for AWS or web security.

Per course. Many courses are available for free. 

• Many courses are created in partnership with industry leaders. Students will get highly valuable practical skills in web development.
• Easy to evaluate the required effort. All courses provide information about length and effort (i.e., “Length: 4 Weeks; Effort: 2-4 hours per week”).
• edX is less focused on general web design or development, and more on specialized web design and development. It’s not a very good option for someone who wants to make a first step in the field of web design.

Front-End Web Developer

Skill level: Advanced

Estimated time:  Seven months (five-seven hours per week)

Price: $895.50 for the full program experience

In this course, you will learn how to develop websites using the latest web standards — how to code with modern HTML5 tags, draw and animate fun web graphics, as well as play audio and video elements. 

What you’ll learn:

• How to code with HTML5
• CSS best practices for web page design
• Fundamentals of JavaScript to help you develop interactive web apps
• Why accessibility and internationalization are important

HTML5 Coding Essentials and Best Practices

Estimated time:  Six weeks (six-eight hours per week)

Price: Free, but you can purchase a verified certificate for $199 USD

In this course, you will learn all the new HTML5 features to help you create excellent websites and applications in a simplified but powerful way. You will also practice coding techniques through multiple interactive examples.

• Learn the HTML5 tags and discover the latest HTML5 forms features
• Play with the audio and video tags 
• Draw and animate fun Web graphics
• Test the basic APIs, such as web storage and geolocation

About the Platform

You probably know LinkedIn as the biggest professional networking platform in the world. What you may not know is that LinkedIn also offers a Learning hub that features courses from top-tier professionals within the network.

Anyone can apply to become a LinkedIn Learning instructor and collaborate with their in-house team to design top-tier curriculums. However, the bar for getting accepted as an instructor is somewhat higher than with other platforms, which is excellent news for users.

LinkedIn Learning offers over 600 courses for web designers, ranging from introductions to the field to CSS tutorials, lessons on how to create responsive HTML emails, and more.

In our experience, most of the web design courses LinkedIn Learning offers are geared towards beginner web designers, however. That means if you’re already experienced in the field, you may not get much out of a subscription.

LinkedIn Learning subscriptions are included with every LinkedIn Premium plan. Those plans start at $29.99 per month. That means if you’re on the lookout for a job using LinkedIn, you might as well take advantage of Learning courses while you’re at it.

• The platform vets instructors before they can submit courses.
• There’s a massive selection of courses available in dozens of categories.
• Web design courses are mostly geared towards beginners.
• Most courses are relatively short, with an average length between two and three hours (and many shorter entries).

Introduction to Web Design and Development

Skill level: Beginner

Estimated time: Three-four hours

Price: Included with a subscription

This course covers the basics of HTML and CSS, and it provides an introduction to best coding practices. Then the course veers more towards web design, discussing fundamentals, what design jobs entail, and an overview of what tools you can expect to use.

• The basics of HTML and CSS
• An introduction to best coding practices
• What types of web design jobs you can find
• What tools web designers use for their day-to-day tasks

Sketch Essential Training: The Basics

Sketch is one of the most popular UX design tools at the moment, and this course provides a comprehensive introduction to what it does and how it works. By the time you’re done, you’ll be able to tackle basic UX design projects using Sketch.

• What Sketch is and how it works
• How to create responsive web layouts
• How to share and collaborate on files
• Exporting Sketch assets

Skillshare is an online marketplace for video-based courses.

Skillshare offers a wide range of web design courses, mainly for beginner and intermediate levels.

Subscription-based: a monthly package costs $32 per month, while an annual plan is $13.99 per month or $168 per year (billed annually).

• Wide range of topics for beginners
• Inexpensive
• Quality of training varies

Responsive Web Design Essentials

Estimated time: 16 hours 47 minutes

The course has 127 lessons and covers everything you need to build professional responsive websites. You will go all the way from creating your first page through uploading your website to the internet. 

• How to work with responsive images and icons
• How to create forms and choose great fonts for your website
• How to add carousels, cards, and complex looking menus

Visual Hierarchy & Spacing in Web Design

Estimated time: 1 hour 10 minutes

This course is all about visual hierarchy in design and spacing. The course has 11 lessons on the various ways to establish a visual hierarchy, and how to use proper spacing to achieve a minimalistic style of web design. 

• The concepts of visual hierarchy in design and spacing
• Functional minimalism and how to use it in web design

Treehouse was founded by web designer Ryan Carson in 2011. The platform offers more than 300 courses in design and development. More than just an educational organization, Treehouse is also an excellent community for students.

Treehouse created a track called “Web design”. This track consists of a list of courses that will take you from the web basics (such as “What is HTML?”) to the specific areas of web design (such as HTML grids). Treehouse uses a video format for lessons, which makes it easy to comprehend the information.

Subscription-based, starting at $29.99/month. The price will be higher if you want to get advanced training (up to $199/month). Treehouse offers a seven-day free trial for everyone who wants to check out the training first.

• Treehouse offers a well-structured learning program. It adopts a progressive teaching method—the student builds upon the basics and moves on to more advanced areas.
• Treehouse is known for constantly updating its lessons. The information in courses is up-to-date with the latest techniques and technologies.
• Treehouse uses clever techniques of awards and badges to motivate you to finish a track. Those awards and badges are visible to employers, so they can evaluate a profile based on the awards. 
• A supportive online community of people you learn with.
• Video tutorials can only be downloaded when you choose pricier plans.

Web Design Process

Estimated time: 43 minutes

In this course, you’ll learn about the major steps involved in designing websites. You will learn how to gather information, explore potential concepts, and iterate on a design. By the end, you’ll have the foundation you need to continue your design journey.

• Design discovery
• Design exploration

Responsive Layouts

Estimated time: 47 minutes

In this course, you’re going to use the foundational principles of responsive design as a framework for thinking about page layout. By the end, you should have a better understanding of how to approach common decisions in responsive design.

• Responsive design theory
• Media queries
• Breakpoints
• Page layout

Udacity offers vocational courses for professionals (the platform calls them ‘Nano Degrees’).

Udacity offers two courses for web specialists: Front-end web developer and Full-stack web developer. Both are long-term courses.

Pay per course. The four-month access to Udacity will cost $1,356.

• Strong focus on web development. 
• Career-focused courses. Udacity teaches specialized skills and helps seasoned web developers get to the next level of their careers.
• Courses are aimed at seasoned specialists rather than beginners.
• Education requires a serious time commitment.

Front End Web Developer

Estimated time: Four months (at five-ten hours/week)

Price: $1,356

The goal of the Front End Web Developer Nanodegree program is to equip students with the skills they need to build and develop a variety of websites and applications. Graduates of this Nanodegree program will be able to construct responsive websites using CSS, Flexbox, and CSS Grid, develop interactive websites using JavaScript and HTML and connect a web application to back-end server data using JavaScript.

• CSS & website layout
• JavaScript and the DOM
• Web APIs and asynchronous applications
• Build Tools, Webpack, and Service Worker

Full Stack Web Developer

Estimated time: 4 months (at 5–10 hours/week)

By the end of this course, you will get the unique skills you need to build database-backed APIs and web applications. A graduate of this program will be able to design and build databases for software applications, create and deploy database-backed web APIs, and secure and manage user authentication and access control for an application back end.

• SQL and data modeling for the web
• Identity access management

Just like Skillshare, Udemy is a marketplace where anyone can post a course. All courses have video explanations, and many courses are available in multiple languages.

Udemy provides a broad range of web design topics. You can find everything from web fundamentals to very niche courses (such as how to use Adobe After Effects to create a web animation ). However, most of these courses are for beginners.

Pay per course. The price starts at $12.99 with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

• Lots of valuable courses for beginners. 
• The platform shows total ratings and reviews for each course. It’s easy to see what courses are in demand for students. Also, all teachers have a rating, and it’s easy to understand the quality of the content they provide. 
• It’s possible to download videos for offline viewing using the Udemy mobile app.
• The quality of courses can vary
• No free trial

UI & Web Design Using Adobe Illustrator CC

Estimated time: Four hours

Price: $14.99

In this course, you’ll learn how to design a professional website in Adobe Illustrator CC. You will start right at the basics of Illustrator and work your way through to building professional UI designs. This course doesn’t cover how to code a website but focuses on the design processes that professional UI designers use when working.

• Work as a UI designer building web design & app designs
• Use Illustrator to a professional level
• Know how to build wireframes
• Know how to build sitemaps
• Know how to design for a responsive website
• Professional workflows and shortcuts

Landing Page Design & Conversion Rate Optimization

Estimated time: 10 hours

Price: $15.99

This course will teach you the fundamental psychological principles of good landing page design and will help you understand the buyer’s journey so you can design landing pages that convert better. It will also teach you how to test your designs so you can design final landing pages that will convert 20-30% more than your current website and landing pages.

• Design a high converting landing page from scratch without a single line of code
• Double or triple your landing page conversion rates by applying the principles of clarity, simplicity, and perceived value
• Run A/B tests to guarantee a better conversion rate over time, without knowing any statistics
• Know exactly how to design a Call-to-Action that will motivate your visitors to take the actions you want
• Apply psychological persuasion frameworks to your landing pages and websites

There are a lot of online coding bootcamps, but freeCodeCamp offers one of the most comprehensive curriculums that you can find, all for free. If you follow its free 3,000-hour curriculum, you’ll walk away with solid fundamentals for a full-stack development career.

freeCodeCamp’s main course is geared more towards web developers, but the whole thing starts by covering HTML, basic CSS, and applied web design. After you’re done with that portion of the course, you can walk away with a Responsive Web Design Certification, and decide whether to stick around and learn about programming languages.

The entire goal of freeCodeCamp is that you walk away from the course with a portfolio filled with real projects. The web design curriculum covers how to build that basic portfolio, and you’re expected to complete several projects that you can add to it.

Keep in mind that most of freeCodeCamp’s curriculum is text-based, however, and you’re expected to tinker with basic code at every step of the way.

As you can guess from its name, freeCodeCamp is 100% free.

• The platform offers a comprehensive set of lessons for HTML, CSS, and basic web design.
• You can walk away with a certification after you complete the web design portion of the course.
• You’re expected to complete real-life projects to get a certification, including multiple pages and a portfolio.
• It’s all free.
• freeCodeCamp courses are mostly text-based, and you’re expected to deal with code at every level.

Responsive Web Design Principles

Estimated time: Two-three hours

Price: Free

You’ll learn the basics about responsive web design, including how to create media queries, make images responsive, and deal with typography .

• How to create media queries
• Making images responsive
• How to make typography responsive

Responsive Web Design Projects

Estimated time: 10–20 hours

This portion of the course involves several real-life projects that will test what you’ve learned about HTML, CSS, and responsive web design. The goal is to get feedback from other freeCodeCamp members, who will tell you if your project hit all the right goals.

• How to create fully-working web pages
• How to create a portfolio to showcase your work

Pluralsight is a learning platform focused on tech courses. It includes comprehensive courses for the most popular web design and development technologies on the market. Plus, the platform offers a testing service that can give you an idea of how advanced your skills are in any of the areas it offers courses in. That way, you can jump in and start checking out courses at the optimal level.

Pluralsight offers both ‘paths’ and individual courses. With paths, you get full curriculums meant to provide you with an in-depth understanding of specific aspects of web design. Among the most popular paths, you have options for UX design, in-depth courses for most graphic design software, and more.

Beyond paths, Pluralsight also offers hundreds of individual courses, which you can usually complete in a matter of hours.

Pluralsight plans start at $29 per month for access to the entire course library. More expensive plans enable you to participate in certification exams and opt into interactive courses with actual instructors.

• Gauge your skill level when it comes to web design fundamentals and tools
• Join paths to get structured, in-depth learning for specific aspects of web design
• Check out individual courses to get an overview of any topic you’re interested in
• Interactive lessons are only available as part of the more expensive Pluralsight plans

Creating a Responsive Web Design

This course will guide you through the process of creating a basic responsive website. It assumes that you’re already familiar with HTML, and dives into the CSS you’ll want to use to make a page responsive.

• How to use CSS to design a responsive web page

The Art of A/B Testing for Web Design

You’ll learn how to plan and execute A/B tests that tell you which web design variants users prefer. The course uses Photoshop CC and teaches you how to use a free A/B testing tool.

• How to plan and execute A/B tests for web designs

The Interaction Design Foundation offers a broad range of online UX courses. The foundation features individual courses, bootcamps, and regular webinars, all focusing on the finer points of UX design. Every class is graded by actual professors, and you get certificates at the end of each course.

If you’re interested in UX design, the Interaction Design Foundation should be one of your first stops for online learning. The foundation offers regular UX bootcamps, but in most cases, we recommend taking individual courses at your own pace.

That’s because the foundation offers dozens of UX design courses, each meant for different levels of experience. Moreover, a monthly membership enables you to enroll in as many courses as you want, and most of them cover a broad curriculum. That’s a sharp contrast to many other platforms, where courses may only take you an hour or two to get through.

Interaction Design Foundation memberships start at $11 per month, which gives you access to all of its courses. Bootcamps, on the other hand, usually start at $1,000+, but the price depends on what each camp covers.

• There’s a broad library of courses focused on UX design.
• The foundation divides courses according to the level of difficulty, which makes it easier to track your progress.
• Courses are very in-depth and usually include multiple days of classes.
• You won’t find courses that don’t focus on UX design here.

How to Create a UX Portfolio

Estimated time: Approximately 12 hours over three weeks

This course will help you design a UX portfolio and decide which projects to feature in yours. You’ll also learn about which tools are the best for this scenario and how to tailor your resume for UX design positions.

• How to create a UX portfolio
• How to tailor your resume for UX positions

Data-Driven Design: Quantitative Research for UX

Estimated time: Approximately 18 hours over seven weeks

If you’re the kind of person who likes to make design decisions based on data, you’re going to love this course. Here you’ll learn about quantitative and statistical analysis and how to use them for UX research. Don’t worry, though – the course doesn’t require you to use mathematical formulas or dig too deep into statistics, as it focuses more on best practices for analyses.

• How to apply quantitative and statistical analysis to UX research

Thinkful offers comprehensive boot camps for several tech fields, including software engineering, data science, and UX/UI design. Unlike most boot camps, it offers both full and part-time curriculums, so you can find an option that adjusts to your needs.

Thinkful’s UI/UX design course lasts five or six months, depending on whether you decide to study full-time or not. The courses include two live mentoring sessions per week, as well as access to a self-paced prep course. Thinkful also offers personalized career coaching to help you find a UX design job once you’re done learning and have your professional certificate.

The full-time boot camp costs $12,500 if paid upfront, whereas the part-time option costs $7,900. Thinkful also offers payment plans, loans, and month-to-month paying options.

• It’s one of the only boot camps dedicated to UI/UX design.
• You get access to weekly mentoring sessions that complement multimedia learning materials.
• You get help when it comes to finding placements, as well as optimizing your portfolio and your curriculum.
• The boot camp is expensive and requires a significant time commitment.

BrainStation offers both online boot camps and courses for several tech fields, including UX design. Its boot camps come highly rated, and it claims to have a job placement rate of over 90% for students that complete its courses.

BrainStation offers a specialized full-time UX design boot camp, as well as a multitude of UI design courses. Whether you opt for a boot camp or an individual course, you walk away with a certificate and you get to learn through interactive lessons, listening to guest speakers, and submitting projects.

BrainStation doesn’t advertise prices publicly, and you have to reach out for a quote depending on which boot camp or course you’re interested in.

• It offers both boot camp and individual course options.
• The selection of UI courses is comprehensive, and each course covers its topic in depth.
• You get to learn from guest speakers.
• The platform is not upfront about how long each course or bootcamp lasts or what its prices are, so you’ll have to reach out for more details.

Designlab offers what is perhaps the most comprehensive UX/UI design course you can find online. The course lasts around eight months on average if you work on assignments and lessons for about 20 hours per week.

With Designlab, you get one-on-one mentoring that includes weekly calls, written feedback, and back and forth communication at any time if you have specific questions. The course itself focuses on the fundamentals of UX/UI design, career placement and coaching, and more.

The full Designlab course costs $6,249 if paid upfront, and it also offers payment plans.

• A comprehensive UX/UI design course that lasts around eight months on average
• One-on-one mentoring from UX/UI design professionals
• The full course requires a significant time commitment

About the Course

Skillcrush is a learning platform that offers a variety of in-depth courses for programming, digital marketing, and visual design. Each course can take months to complete, depending on how much time you put into it, and there are often thousands of students enrolled at the same time.

Skillcrush’s visual design course is perfect if you don’t have any experience in web design. It covers fundamentals such as color theory and typography and also teaches you how to use popular tools like Photoshop and Illustrator.

Throughout the course, you’ll submit multiple projects to be evaluated, including logos, social media designs, and brand style guides.

The full visual design course costs $549 if you pay upfront, and Skillcrush also offers monthly payment options.

• This is a comprehensive visual design course created with beginners in mind.
• You’ll learn how to use multiple popular web design tools.
• You’ll walk away with a portfolio of projects that you can show off.
• If you already have experience with web design, you won’t get much out of this course.

About This Platform

General Assembly offers multiple boot camps per year for several tech-related fields, including web and UX design. Its boot camps offer job placement aid and payment plan options.

With General Assembly, you get access to multiple months of learning materials as well as instructors to guide you along at every step. The UX design boot camp includes coaching to help you build a portfolio with the projects you submit, and help with finding jobs in the field after you graduate.

General Assembly’s UX design boot camp costs $14,950 if you pay upfront, and it also offers several financing options.

• A comprehensive UX design curriculum that covers everything you need to apply for entry-level positions
• Help polishing collaborative and individual projects that you can use for your portfolio
• Coaching on how to apply for UX design positions
• It’s one of the most expensive UX design boot camps on the market

FutureLearn is an online learning platform that offers courses on a broad range of subjects. Several of the courses are offered for free by companies looking to train employees, or by universities that are looking to expand their online learning platforms.

FutureLearn’s Digital Skills: User Experience course is sponsored by Accenture, which means that you can enroll for free. The course lasts approximately three weeks, and it covers the importance of UX design, how to conduct research, and the basics of what you need to know to create your own projects.

The Digital Skills: User Experience course is sponsored by Accenture, so you can enroll for free.

• It provides a comprehensive foundation for UX designers.
• The course is geared mostly towards students with little to no experience with UX design.

Envato Tuts+ is part of a network of sites that focus on selling web design and development assets, tools, and courses. Within Envato Tuts+, you can find hundreds of courses submitted by all kinds of users and of varying lengths.

Envato Tuts+ has a section dedicated solely to web design courses. Most of the options you’ll find here are incredibly targeted and tend to be relatively short, with between one to three hours of material.

A lot of the web design courses that you can find here are free, and you can access the rest by paying for a single subscription.

An Envato subscription costs $16.50 per month and gives you access to hundreds of web design elements such as stock photos, videos, courses, and even WordPress themes and plugins.

• You get access to a broad range of web design courses.
• A lot of the courses are free.
• A single subscription provides you access to all paid courses.
• Most of the web design courses are relatively short.
• A lot of courses are misclassified, which means you’ll find non-web-design-related options within that category.

Adobe XD For Beginners

Estimated time: Approximately two-three hours

This course will introduce you to Adobe XD and when to use the tool, as well as how to create and manage artboards from scratch. You’ll also cover advanced functionality such as plugins and responsive design.

• What each Adobe XD tool does
• How to prototype using Adobe XD

Essential CSS Libraries for Web Designers

Estimated time: Approximately one-two hours

In this course, you’ll learn about CSS libraries and about what the most popular options for web design are. To get the most out of the course, we recommend that you already have a solid foundation in CSS.

• How to use CSS libraries
• What the most popular CSS libraries for web design are and when to use them

Keep Learning To Become a Better Web Designer

Good web designers are lifelong learners. The process of learning web design is an excellent way to enhance your creativity and ultimately allows you to build a solid set of skills. And since web design is a broad field with a lot of different areas, the more knowledge you gain, the more in demand you will be.

Do you have any recommendations for web design courses that you’d like to share with everyone else? Let’s talk about them in the comments section below!

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The best online web design courses

Whether you're a beginner, or want to add to your skillset further, you'll find the best online web design courses here.

Whether you're a beginner or student, or a serious professional, you need to keep learning throughout your web design career, or you'll quickly become irrelevant. There are new web design tools , new languages, and new approaches to the profession emerging all the time. And the best online web design courses can help you stay ahead of the curve, efficiently and easily. 

But there's a near-endless variety of courses on the web right now, and they're not all the same standard by any means. You don't need any sort of qualification to make and sell a web design course, so it's hard to know who to trust. To help you out, we've compiled the very best online web design courses in this post, and explain what each of them has to offer.

Right now, we believe the very best online web design courses are to be found at Treehouse . This platform offers first-class video training, in a gamified system that keeps you motivated to finish your course. Led by industry pros, you can be sure the training will be up to date, and actually relevant to your career.

Other online web design courses are, however, also available. And some may fit your needs better. So in this post, we’ve brought together the best of the best, and explain how each of them differ. 

One last thing: we're focusing here on services that provide a wide range of online web design course. If, though, you just want to learn a specific language, see our guide to online coding courses instead.

01. Treehouse

Specifications, reasons to buy, reasons to avoid.

Founded in 2011, Treehouse offers hundreds of video-based training courses in web design, web development, mobile development and game development, from beginner to advanced levels. The videos are professionally shot, the quality of instruction is first-class, and everything is constantly updated to take newly emerging technologies into account (new content is released weekly). 

While online training lets you learn at your own pace, that often makes it difficult to motivate yourself to finish the course. Treehouse, however, has found a clever way to square this circle. 

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After watching a video, you then take interactive quizzes and challenges, to test that you’ve understood it correctly. If you pass, you get badges, which appear on your profile. This gamification really does help spur you on to keep learning. 

You won't need any special hardware or operating system (other than a Mac if you’re learning iOS ), and you can even write code inside the Treehouse App using a feature called Workspaces. Subscriptions, which offer you access to all the training courses on the site, start at £20/month, and there’s a seven-day free trial if you want to check out the training first. There are special rates for companies, non-profits, schools, organisations and businesses too.

02. Sitepoint

Founded in 1999, Sitepoint quickly became known as one of the most authoritative book publishers on web design. Since 2010 it's also been in the business of online web design courses, and they're highly respected within the industry. 

Previously marketed under the name Learnable, the company's courses take you on a clear learning pathway, and are supplemented by excellent materials, including ebooks, talks and screencasts. 

A SitePoint Premium account costs $9 a month, or $6 a month billed annually, and gives you 'all you can eat access' to the whole range of courses. These include everything from the fundamentals like HTML, CSS and JavaScript to advanced languages such as PHP and Python, plus broader topics including design, UX, DevOps and workflow.

03. LinkedIn Learning

Previously known as Lynda.com, LinkedIn puts a laser-like focus on helping you improve your career prospects. For example, when you're logged into LinkedIn, you’ll find that training content that’s relevant to your needs automatically surfaces. Moreover, when you learn new skills, the system makes it easy to highlight these on your LinkedIn profile. 

All the courses are available via a subscription, and a month-long free trial is also available. There are currently more than 4,000 courses in web design and web development to choose from, largely focused on beginner to intermediate levels. 

These cover everything from basics like writing HTML and using Adobe XD, through to more sophisticated fare like CSS Animation and Flexbox.  So unless you’re looking for something very niche or advanced, you’re likely to find the exact training you’re looking for. 

However, you’ll have to do a bit of searching, as the courses are not particularly well organised. And there doesn’t seem to be the same concerted effort made by Treehouse to ensure students progress from course to course to slowly but surely build their skills; there’s more of a ‘pick and mix’ feel to this learning environment. Finally, be aware that some courses are quite old, though at least this is obvious, with the year of creation clearly stated.

If you’re not keen on taking out a subscription, then Udemy might be a better bet for your online web design training, as you only pay per course.

Note, though, that while Treehouse and LinkedIn Learning carefully curate their courses, Udemy is basically a marketplace where anyone can post a course and try their luck at earning some cash. That means that employers are unlikely to see you completing a course on Udemy as a ‘proper’ qualification.

That doesn’t mean, however, that there aren’t some excellent courses on this site. While Udemy courses are less likely to be as professionally shot as those on Treehouse or Lynda, that can make them more authentic and relatable. The website handily includes customer reviews so you can see which ones are hitting the right notes with students. Courses are generally free, and some are even free. 

You can download videos for offline viewing via the mobile app, and there are a large range of web design topics covered, including WordPress , HTML, CSS and Photoshop . Note, though, that most of these courses are beginner level.

05. Thinkful

Launched in 2012 (as Bloc), Thinkful describes itself as an “online coding bootcamp” that aims to take you from being a beginner to job-ready web developer. 

Learning materials are a combination of written and video lessons, but Thinkful's special sauce is an apprenticeship model that pairs you with an experienced mentor, who provides support and guidance throughout the course via 14 hours of live Q&A per day. There are also weekly group discussions and daily group critiques.

They make it clear that “learning to code requires a lot of hard work. You can’t learn by osmosis, you have to build. You have to bang your head against problems and work your way out.” In other words, these structured learning programs are not for the faint-hearted, but aimed squarely at highly motivated students. 

With each module you’ll face an assessment by a person who’s not your mentor; this will be similar to a real-world technical interview. Courses are full-time, typically over five to six months, and range from $7,000-$13,600. But you don't need to pay upfront; only when you get a job.

06. Udacity

Founded in 2011, Udacity was originally focused on offering university style courses, but now focuses more on vocational courses for professionals, which it calls 'Nano Degrees'. These courses typically walk you through building a project, and then you apply what you’ve learned to a project of your own. 

These are long-term courses and there are set times for lessons. To give you a flavour of how that works in practice, Bilal Tahir has written an excellent account of the React Nano Degree he took here . 

Aimed at “lifelong learners” rather than beginners, Udacity is firmly focused on teaching specialised skills to help web designers get to the next level. Created in partnership with Google, AT&T and Facebook, topics covered include autonomous systems, AI, machine learning and full-stack web development. 

You pay per course, and they're neither short not cheap. For example, the course in AI Programming with Python takes place over three months at 10 hours per week, and costs £329. That said, at time of writing, the website is offering a 75 per cent discount on all courses, bringing the cost down to £83 per month. 

07. Launch School

If the idea of a full-on, intensive bootcamp scares you, then here's the opposite: “The Slow Path for Studious Beginners to a Career in Software Development”. 

There are two main courses: Core Curriculum and Capstone. The first teaches you the fundamentals of software development; so it’s not about learning how to use a specific language, such as React or Rails, but about slowly building up your understanding of basic principles, so you get how higher level abstractions work from the bottom up. It takes approximately 1,200-1,800 hours (8-16+ months) to complete.

After that, there’s an admissions-based course focused on helping students acquire career-launching opportunities. This involves three months’ full-time study. 

Launch School charges costs $199 a month. Alternatively, you can go for the deferred option and be charged $299 a month, but only once you've completed the course and got a job.

08. Pluralsight

Founded in 2004, Pluralsight offers quality video training courses taught by IT specialists. Its web design courses include topics like CSS, JavaScript, Angular, React and HTML5, and range from beginner to advanced level. 

Interestingly, Pluralsight has an innovative way to check that the course is right for you: the ‘Pluralsight IQ’ test, which promises to test your skill level in just five minutes. The service also offers 24/7 support, you can download courses for offline viewing, and subscriptions start at $29/£24 per month.

09. Skillshare

Like Udemy, Skillshare is an online marketplace for video-based courses of all kinds, including web design courses, mainly for beginner and intermediate levels. While the quality may vary, it’s all cheap and cheerful. That said, it's stretching things a little to them ‘courses’, when some videos are less than an hour long. 

That said, there’s a wide range of topics on offer, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, UX/UI design, responsive web design, web development and WordPress. And so if you need to plug a specific knowledge gap, this might be a good place to come. You can unlock unlimited access to thousands of classes from just £7 / $8.25 per month for an annual subscription.

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Tom May is an award-winning journalist and editor specialising in design, photography and technology. Author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Great TED Talks: Creativity , published by Pavilion Books, Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. Today, he is a regular contributor to Creative Bloq and its sister sites Digital Camera World , T3.com and Tech Radar . He also writes for Creative Boom and works on content marketing projects. 

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The 18 Best Online Web Design Courses in 2024 (Free and Paid)

Want to learn web design? Good decision! There’s only one problem – where do you start?

With so many resources available online, it can be confusing to find the right web design class for you. There are thousands of different tutorials, courses, books, videos, and other types of content. How can you tell what’s worth your time, effort and perhaps your money?

Not to worry! We’ve created a thorough guide to selecting the best web design class. If you want to become a web designer, you definitely need to read this!

In this post, we’ll first cover the things you’ll need to learn as a web designer.

Then, we’ll talk about the factors you should consider when selecting a web design class.

Finally, we’ll look at the 18 best online web design courses available.

Let’s get designing!

What Do You Need to Learn?

Now that we know what web design is, we have to answer the next question – what do you need to learn to become a web designer?

Web design classes will cover most popular subjects , but some will focus on one area more than another.

Frontend vs. Backend

Before anything else, these two terms are important to understand:

• Frontend (sometimes written Front End) means the user-facing part of a software application. When it comes to websites, this means what the web browser shows. Web design can be considered a part of frontend development, as you are designing the actual pages seen by users. To learn frontend development, you’ll need to know things like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
• Backend (sometimes written Back End) is everything that goes on behind the scenes, on the web server and database. We won’t cover backend development in this article.

Image Editing

While not strictly falling under “web design”, the ability to edit images is a crucial skill to have for any web designer.

There are two types of programs you’ll want to learn:

Raster Graphics Editing Software (Photoshop, GIMP)

Raster graphics are made up of tiny pieces, called pixels. The most common example of a raster image is a photograph, but many other types of images are rasters too. In fact, most images are pixel-based, so you’ll definitely want to learn how to edit them.

Larger raster graphics have more pixels, and smaller ones have less pixels. Thus, smaller images (usually) have a smaller file size.

Photoshop is the best known raster graphics editing software package. However, it requires a monthly subscription, so you may want to use a free alternative.

Some of the best alternatives are GIMP and Paint.NET .

Vector Graphics Editing Software (Illustrator, InkScape)

The other well-known type of editing software you should learn is for vector graphics. Unlike raster graphics, vectors are not made up of pixels.

Instead, vector graphics are made from mathematical formulas and shapes, like lines, circles, and squares. When you make a vector graphic larger or smaller, the file size is not noticeably larger.

The most widely-used vector graphics editing program is Adobe Illustrator. Other alternatives include InkScape and Affinity Designer.

Web Design Languages

To be a web designer, you’ll need to learn a few different languages. Some of these are “markup” languages, while others are “programming” languages. This might sound like a complex concept, but it’s rather simple:

• Markup languages format a document’s text and other elements. HTML is an example of a markup language. It organizes the content but doesn’t perform any computing actions itself.
• Programming languages perform actions based on logical rules. JavaScript and PHP are commonly-used languages with WordPress. With them, you can create processes based on logic and other rules.

HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the basic language of web pages. It’s what makes up the structure of a webpage like the headings, paragraphs, and other elements.

HTML is very easy to learn and requires little-to-no technical knowledge. Virtually every web design class starts with a section on HTML, as it is the starting point for anything to do with websites.

HTML looks like this:

Learn more about HTML.

Cascading Style Sheets, (CSS), is the language used to customize the fonts , colors, and other design elements of HTML items. CSS is very important to understand, as you cannot make any design changes without using it.

Normally, you put CSS code into .css files, but you can also add it directly to HTML files.

CSS looks like this:

Thankfully, the basics of CSS are very simple to understand and virtually anyone can learn them in a few hours.

Learn more about CSS .

JavaScript (JS)

JavaScript is one of the most widely used programming languages on the web. It is used to add dynamic elements to your website. This means anything that is animated, moves, or is interactive will use JavaScript.

With technologies like node.js, JavaScript is increasingly used as a backend language, too. While you probably don’t need to worry about backend design as a web designer, it’s still nice that learning JavaScript is useful for these scenarios too.

Most web design courses will include sections on JavaScript.

Learn more about JavaScript .

PHP is another widely used programming language. While it isn’t normally used directly for designing things, it’s still very important to know.

WordPress is written in PHP, as are WordPress plugins. In fact, it’s common to add PHP code directly to your theme .

PHP looks like this:

Learn more about PHP .

In addition to the languages listed above, you’ll probably also want to learn Bootstrap. Bootstrap is a free library that lets you quickly create attractive, responsive websites.

It is widely used by designers and developers to save themselves time when creating a new project or side project. Many web design courses include a section on Bootstrap.

Learn more about Bootstrap .

User Experience / User Interface (UX/UI)

While not strictly falling under the category of web design, UX/UI is still a useful topic to learn.

In essence, this is how interfaces and websites are designed. the best way to present a button, how certain actions appear on a two-dimensional screen, and so on.

The basics of UX/UI are very helpful for understanding the best way to create a website that is easy and enjoyable to use.

Learn more about UX/UI.

How to Evaluate Web Design Courses

Now that we know what we want to learn, let’s talk about evaluating courses. What should you look for? What factors should you take into consideration?

How large is your learning budget? How much are you willing to spend? It probably depends on the situation.

If you’re just creating a website for a personal project , you may not want to spend much, if any, money on a web design course.

But if you’re planning a career change and want to get the best education possible, you might not mind spending $50 or $100 on a course.

Experience Level of Teacher

How knowledgeable is the teacher (or teachers?) Are they well-known in the community? Are they qualified enough to teach you about web design?

Google the program and the teacher, if possible. Look for reviews and customer feedback, but also look for any information about the creator of the course.

What are their credentials and do they have a portfolio or examples of work they’ve done themselves?

Medium (Video, Text, Etc.)

How do you prefer to learn? By reading? By watching a video? Maybe a live course? Before choosing a course, try to experiment with different mediums to see which one works best for you.

Many courses offer a combination of reading and watching, while others only have videos or books.

Does It Lead to Employment?

If you are learning web design to get a better job, it is important to investigate the results that typical students get after going through the course.

Are they employed? At good jobs? How satisfied are they with the course?

Most free courses will not have any data on their job placements or customer satisfaction. However, many courses on paid platforms like Skillcrush have career counselors, statistics about their students, and other information.

Length and Depth of Material

If you are paying for the course, it pays to check out how much material you’re actually paying for. Is it a significant amount and worth the price of admission?

While this isn’t very important for free courses, it definitely is for paid courses! Especially if you are on a budget.

Builds a Portfolio of Real-World Projects

A very important (but often forgotten) aspect of web design is that you need to build projects, not simply read about them. Most courses will include some sections where you build projects in step-by-step fashion.

However, not all do this. Some only explain technologies, show a few examples, and assume that you’ll figure out the rest yourself.

Web Design Certificate or Qualification

Finally, you should decide if a web design certificate of completion or a credential is important to you. If you’re looking for a job at an older, more established corporation, it will probably be useful.

If you’re looking for work for a startup, however, it’s more likely that your portfolio of work projects will be more important.

In either case, if a credential is available, it’s probably a good idea to take it!

The 18 Best Online Web Design Courses for 2024

Now let’s delve into the web design courses themselves. They are categorized into three areas:

• Completely free: These items are free and have no paywalls or other restrictions.
• Freemium: These courses have both free and paid sections. Typically, the main part of the course is free while any extras or personalized support costs money.
• Paid only: These are only accessible if you pay a fee. Usually the fees are fairly reasonable, or at least less than most universities! Some are monthly, while others are a one-time flat fee.

Completely Free Web Design Courses

These resources are completely free to use. There are no catches or gotchas — just free learning materials!

1. W3Schools

Named after the World Wide Web, W3Schools is one of the oldest web design educational sites in the world. Originally started in 1998, the website has tons of free tutorials that cover every aspect of web design and development.

They also have a Try-It-Yourself section for nearly every guide, which is a big help for seeing how code actually works.

2. Free Code Camp

freeCodeCamp.org is a totally free site with over 7,000 tutorials. As a nonprofit website , it is dedicated to teaching people how to code.

One strong point of freeCodeCamp.org is that it offers completely free certificates in a number of useful web technologies. These include:

• Responsive web design
• JavaScript algorithms and data structures
• Front end development libraries

…plus tons of other skills that are useful for any web designer.

3. Dash by General Assembly

General Assembly is a coding bootcamp that offers numerous intensive courses. They also have a free course that teaches HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with small browser-based projects.

These cover new technologies like HTML5, CSS3, and the latest versions of JavaScript. You don’t need to sign up for a bootcamp to do the course, although you may want to after completing it.

4. Free Web Design Course by Flux

This web design video course is one of the most popular on YouTube. With over 20 videos, you’ll learn everything you need to know.

The topics covered include HTML, CSS, JavaScript, wireframes, content structure, and more. It also covers useful background information, like the history of web design, typography, choosing images for your websites, layouts, colors and psychology, design hierarchy, UX/UI and home page design.

5. Programming with Mosh

Programming with Mosh is another excellent YouTube channel that has a ton of free information about web design. Mosh is a good teacher and makes everything easy to understand, especially for those people that are completely new to computers and web design.

Mosh’s videos cover virtually every topic you’ll need to learn, including HTML, design, PHP, JavaScript, and other tips and tricks for being a great web designer and developer.

6. Khan Academy

Khan Academy is a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching just about everything, including science, mathematics, history, and art. One of these courses covers computer programming.

This computer programming course is an excellent introduction to basic concepts in web design, including the intricacies of HTML and CSS. There are also community forums in which you can get help from other users.

Mozilla is the organization that runs the Firefox web browser. They also have some helpful guides to creating websites.

Their online web design course is aimed at complete beginners, which makes it a great place to learn about web sites and web browsers.

Freemium Web Design Courses (Free with Paid Upgrades or Certifications)

These web courses are “freemium”, meaning that they have free content with paid upgrades or other benefits.

8. Codecademy

Codecademy is an excellent website that has a ton of courses on different aspects of web design and development. Most of their courses are free to use, but you’ll need to sign up for a pro plan to gain access to extra features and content.

These start at $19 a month if billed yearly. Codecademy also has a large number of certifications available, which are definitely useful for career building.

9. Skillcrush

Skillcrush is a website aimed at those who want to change careers into web development. They have a number of different courses, most of which are paid.

However, they also have a free coding camp, which teaches you the basics of HTML, CSS, WordPress, and web design.

10. Future Learn

Future Learn partners with institutions like universities to teach different subjects. In partnership with the University of Michigan, they offer a course in UX Design and Research.

You can take the course for free, but if you want to receive the accreditation, you’ll need to pay $395.

11. Open Classrooms

OpenClassrooms has a large number of free courses on HTML, JavaScript, and other web design technologies. They also offer diplomas and certificates, which can help you find a job with your new skills.

Perhaps best of all, OpenClassrooms has career assistance and guarantees that you’ll find a job within 6 months of completing their program. If you don’t find a job, you’ll get your money back.

12. Coursera: Web Design for Everybody

This Coursera class is offered in partnership with the University of Michigan. In it, you’ll learn the basics of web design and development, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

You can view all of the class materials for free, but if you want to get the credit, you’ll need to pay extra.

Paid Web Design Courses

These courses are paid only. There is no free version available. However, they tend to be significantly more thorough and often provide services like career assistance and placement.

13. TreeHouse

Treehouse has a huge library of classes on web design and development. Everything is based on “tracks”, which guide you through the different things you’ll need to learn for different job roles.

To take these courses, you’ll need to sign up for Treehouse’s monthly plan at $25/month.

Treehouse also offers “Techdegree”, a bootcamp program that helps you go through the entire library of their courses. This starts at $199 per month per course.

14. Udemy: Web Design for Beginners

This Udemy course is one of the more popular web design classes available. If you get it at a discount, it’s also quite affordable.

In the class, you’ll learn HTML, CSS, responsive design, and virtually everything else you’ll need to know to learn web design.

15. W3Cx’s Front-End Web Development Course

This course on edX will teach you HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other skills necessary to create interactive websites. It’s designed primarily to be done part-time, which makes it ideal for those with full-time jobs.

16. Frontend Masters

Frontend Masters is a site dedicated to frontend web development. This is a strength in comparison to many other options, which tend to cover “everything” related to web design.

They have over 100 different courses, which you can access by signing up for a monthly or yearly plan. These start at $39 per month.

Web design classes include website accessibility, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and more. Best of all, they are always adding new content to keep you continually up to date on the latest trends and developments.

Overall, Frontend Masters is an excellent choice for more intermediate or advanced users trying to take their skills to the next level.

17. Udacity Nanodegree: Front End Web Developer

This “nanodegree” is a course in becoming a front end developer. In it, you’ll learn the skills needed to create a variety of different websites and online applications. It covers CSS, Flexbox, CSS Grid, UX/UI, JavaScript, and more.

It comes with a ton of content and usually takes students about 4 months to complete. As such, it is rather expensive, at a total price of $1,356.

18. Udemy: The Web Developer Bootcamp 2021

With over 200,000 ratings, this course is one of the most popular web development classes on Udemy. You’ll learn everything you need to know to build modern websites, such as HTML, CSS, JS, node.js, and tons of other technologies.

In total, there are over 60 hours of lectures, which is a lot of content. Although it may seem expensive at $169.99, Udemy often runs discounts and deals, so be on the lookout for any sales or special offers.

Even if you don’t manage to find a discount, it’s still worthwhile and cheaper than many other alternatives.

Web Design Classes

Excited to begin your web design journey? You should now know exactly what you need to learn and where you can learn it. While there are a ton of resources available (too many, perhaps!) we hope this guide has helped you narrow down your choices.

In this post, we covered everything you need to know about becoming a web designer. Then we considered the different elements of web design classes and how to pick one that matches your goals.

Finally, we went through the absolute best web design courses online today.

How did you become a web designer? Did you use one of the resources above? Or a different one that we didn’t include? Let us know below!

Get exclusive access to new tips, articles, guides, updates, and more.

Disclosure: This blog may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase through one of these links, we may receive a small commission. Read disclosure . Rest assured that we only recommend products that we have personally used and believe will add value to our readers. Thanks for your support!

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Hello Eileen, glad to hear that you liked it.

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Hello Team Astra,

Thank you for this comprehensive blog.

One question …

When are you starting the Brainstorm Force Academy?

Completely focused on Astra and Spectra?

Kind regards,

Hello Marcel,

Please check out this link – https://skilljet.io/all-courses/

Just to let you know, we are planning to add more content focused on Astra and Spectra there. 🙂

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You’re welcome, Dan!

We are glad that our article was helpful to you! 🙂

Excellent article. Astra always at the forefront. Thank you

Hello Astra Team,

Very hepfull article for me who want to learn coding frontend and backend website. Thanks for help.

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8 of the Best Web Design Courses Online

Searching for the best web design courses online so that you can level up your knowledge without leaving the comfort of your home?

While there’s already an abundance of blogs and learning platforms that offer web design courses, it’s important to note that they’re not all equal. Some of those web design programs could turn out to be a waste of not just your time but also your money.

Now, to save you from such an unfortunate outcome, we’ve reviewed our favorite website design schools and identified their best free and paid web design classes.

Best web design courses online in 2023 🏆

With the growth of e-learning, it’s suddenly become possible for beginners to learn the basics of web design using just online classes.

That’s the category of programs that we’ll focus on in this roundup. The eight web design courses featured here are especially perfect for beginners because they teach, among other things, the fundamentals of web design.

• The Webflow Masterclass
• Web Design for Beginners – Udemy
• Design 101: Product & Web Design Course for Beginners
• Web Design for Everybody – Coursera
• Treehouse Web Design Track
• Introduction to Web Development – FutureLearn
• Complete Web Design – Skillshare
• User Experience: The Beginner’s Guide – Interaction Design Foundation

Upon comparing the programs and offerings, your selection for the best web design course will probably come down to things like price and course length. Otherwise, if you’re looking for professional accreditation, you could additionally factor in the web design certificates that accompany the courses.

1. The Webflow Masterclass

First on our list of the best web design courses is The Webflow Masterclass by Ran Segall, a web designer with more than 17 years of experience. The program is available at Flux Academy, a renowned web design school that he founded.

In total, the Webflow Masterclass web design course is comprised of 12 hours of online lectures, through which Ran tries to make web design easy. The training here is consistently delivered in a manner that is not intimidating to beginners.

By the time you’ve sailed through all the web design classes, you’ll have learned how to build a website from scratch using Webflow. And while at it, you’ll be getting personalized feedback from experts.

Overall, the course covers the basics of website development, HTML/CSS, CMS, animations, and interactions, as well as case studies that help you understand the subject better.

But, you won’t be getting a web design certificate from the program. Instead, the Webflow Masterclass will connect you to a network of more than 3,500 web designers who have taken the course.

⏱️ Duration:

👩‍🎓 what you’ll learn:.

• Introduction to Webflow
• Webflow basics
• Project implementation
• Dynamic websites
• Animations & interactions
• Advanced use cases
• Web development process
• Project management

💵 Pricing:

$278 per month for three months ($834 total) OR $695 one-time payment.

2. Web Design for Beginners: Real World Coding in HTML & CSS – Udemy

If you are intimidated by the technical jargon of HTML and CSS, this web design course is for you. Ideal for beginners, the online learning program has 52 downloadable resources divided into 11 hours of on-demand video. You just pay a one-time fee and you’ll have lifetime access to all that content.

This web design course is sold through Udemy and taught by Brad Schiff, a tutor and professional web developer. Brad has, so far, taught web development to over 10,000 learners and 100 companies.

Many of his students happen to be beginners, and they like how he tries to simplify HTML and CSS in a way that makes web design training easily accessible. Instead of going through huge chunks of information, you will find the content divided into 22 easy-to-read sections.

You’ll learn not only how to build a website , but also using CSS3 animations and effects to set up responsive layouts. The web design training will further teach you the basics of creating a mobile-friendly layout .

Then once you complete the course, you will earn free web design certification.

10-11 hours

• HTML Essentials
• Adding Media to a Web Page
• Text Basics
• Semantics & Organization
• CSS Essentials
• Intermediate CSS
• Less Exciting Yet Still Necessary CSS Tasks
• CSS Typography
• Developer Timeout!
• CSS Backgrounds
• Responsive Web Design
• What is Flexbox in CSS?
• CSS3 Special Effects
• Leveraging JavaScript without Writing JavaScript
• What is Bootstrap?
• Pushing a Website Live Up Onto The Web
• Cross-Browser Compatibility.

Full price is $129.99. But like many other Udemy courses, you can often get it on sale for just $19.99 – so make sure to jump on that price if you see it.

3. Design 101: Product & Web Design Course for Beginners – Design-lab

Design 101 is a four-week online web design program for beginners. This short course will take you through the entire process of product and website design from ideation to handoff. You’ll do all the stuff practically like you would in an actual company or a studio.

What sets it apart from other online web design programs is the 16 hands-on projects you get to work on. Not many courses can link you up with an expert mentor for one-on-one training on how to define details like color therapy, imagery, and typography. You’ll be working together on all the basic tweaks that make websites more attractive and effective.

The Design 101 web design course suits both beginners and working professionals who want to expand their knowledge. But, you don’t need any design experience to get started.

When you’re done with the project work, you’ll even get a professional website design certificate to showcase on your landing pages.

• Website design, ideating, and sketching
• Color theory, imagery, typography
• Website layout and composition, designing the details
• Going Hi-Fi, design teams, and handoff

4. Web Design for Everybody – University of Michigan @ Coursera

Web Design for Everybody is a Coursera course from Colleen van Lent and Charles Russel Severance of the University of Michigan. It’s targeted towards beginners and covers everything you need to know to start designing and creating websites.

You’ll learn how to structure web pages using HTML and CSS ( following responsive design principles, of course ), as well as how to add interactivity using JavaScript. You’ll also complete a hands-on project as part of the web design course, which should give you real experience in building a site.

All those web design classes are estimated to take six months – but, they’re self-paced and you can always pause or speed up your web design training. All in all, though, the online instructors here recommend a pace of around three hours of web design learning per week.

Your efforts will, in the end, be capped off with a shareable website design certificate.

Six months at three hours/week.

• Introduction to HTML5
• Introduction to CSS3
• Interactivity with JavaScript
• Advanced styling with responsive design

5. Treehouse Web Design Track

The Treehouse Web Design Track isn’t a single course. Rather, it’s a series of courses put together in a cohesive “track” to help you learn all the basics of web design. It starts with a basic introduction to HTML and CSS and then builds up to more advanced topics like Flexbox, mobile-first and responsive layouts, etc.

The track does not touch on JavaScript at all – it’s 100% focused on HTML, CSS, and general web design principles.

Overall, this is a great option if you’re starting from zero and want to quickly get up to speed.

41 hours across the entire track. Individual topics range from 45 minutes to four hours.

• Introduction to HTML and CSS
• The web design process
• CSS basics (layouts, selectors, etc.)
• HTML basics (forms, tables, etc.)
• Responsive and mobile-first design
• More advanced CSS topics like Flexbox, Bootstrap, transforms, Sass, and more.
• How to prototype a website in your browser

You can access all the courses in the track for one price – $25 per month. You also get a seven-day free trial.

6. Introduction to Web Development – FutureLearn

This online web design program is from the Raspberry Pi Foundation – and it will teach you how to build a website using HTML , style it using CSS, and make it interactive with JavaScript. Through the same online classes, you will also learn more about the box model and how web browsers render a finished website from your code.

In essence, FutureLearn has proven to be one of the best web design courses for learning JavaScript and HTML. Even when you sign up as a beginner, you’ll soon understand how JavaScript code interacts with the Document Object Model (DOM).

That notwithstanding, however, it does help to be familiar with the basic programming structures before you take this online web design course. But, don’t expect to graduate from the program with a certificate of completion.

Suggested timing is three weeks at two hours/week, but the course is self-paced.

• HTML tags and attributes
• Styling web pages using CSS
• CSS classes and IDs for styling web page elements
• Layouts in CSS, including the box model and responsive design
• Using JavaScript to make interactive web pages
• The Document Object Model

Taking the course is free. If you want a course certificate, it will cost you $49.

7. Complete Web Design: from Figma design to Webflow development – Skillshare

Ideal for beginners, this six-part web design program is available on Skillshare. It includes several free web design classes, modules, and assignments, all of which add up to about 19 hours of online learning.

Each of the online lessons even comes with corresponding module-wise notes, which should save you the trouble of preparing notes from scratch. The organization of the classes is also outstanding, making it easy and convenient for you to understand and grasp your web design training.

Accompanying all that is a student Discord chat, where you can interact with some of the 6,250+ other students who have taken the course.

• Secrets of good website design
• Practice design like a pro
• Webflow development
• Client project from start to finish
• Freelancing
• Advanced topics

It’s a free web design course.

8. User Experience: The Beginner’s Guide – Interaction Design Foundation

This is an online course from the Interaction Design Foundation that introduces you to the principles of user experience , with the primary goal being to teach you how to create delightful web experiences for your product’s users. You will learn all about the impact of visual perception on the web viewing experience, the design mistakes you must avoid, and why it’s important to prioritize usability over aesthetics.

That makes it one of the best web design courses for UI/UX designers. Once you’re registered, you’ll have lifetime access to its training material, online classes, plus optional meetups.

Within weeks, it provides beginners with a good foundation for blending the key principles of UX/UI design. You’ll also get a web design course certificate on completion.

Estimated 18 hours over 12 weeks, but the course is self-paced.

• Introduction to user experience
• The psychological principles that are the foundation of user experience
• How visual perception affects user experience
• Why usability always trumps aesthetics
• Real examples of good and bad user experience
• How to empathize with your users

Whereas this is a free online course for Interaction Design Foundation members, joining the foundation is not free. Membership for course access alone costs $264 per year. Or, you can pay $2,880 per year to get your own personal coach.

Get started with web design courses online today 🧑‍🏫 💻

We have laid out the eight web design courses online for you.

So, if you are interested in learning web design, go through these and pick the one that fits your requirements.

If you are keen to learn web design and development with Webflow from an expert in the industry, the Webflow Masterclass by Ran Segallis is an ideal choice. Considering the vast module and an expert tutor, it is worth the money.

Introduction to Web Development from FutureLearn is an ideal pick if you’re seeking a free web design program and would want to begin with the basics. It’s particularly suitable for novices who want to try their hand at designing. The course outline is even shorter than other online training programs.

Web Design for Everybody from Coursera and Complete Web Design from Skillshare are permanently free web design courses. Both offer a hands-on approach, complete with a final project that showcases your understanding of the subject.

Web Design for Beginners has an extensive module that will take you deep into web design for an affordable cost of $115.

Design 101 suits those who already have basic knowledge and understanding of web designing and ideating, but it requires a longer-than-average time commitment.

And if you are a UX/UI professional who is looking to expand on your knowledge and continue learning more in the future, consider User Experience: The Beginner’s Guide by the Interaction Design Foundation.

For some more ways to level up your web development knowledge, you can check out our roundup of the five best online WordPress courses .

Have any questions about any of these courses? Let us know in the comments!

By Vandita Jadeja

Themeisle contributor, updated on:, you can check also:.

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Crack the code: How to make website navigation seamless and intuitive

• Last Updated : February 29, 2024
• 11 Min Read

Navigating a website shouldn't be an obstacle course. The key to effective website design lies in guiding users seamlessly through the digital space with easily recognizable menus, strategic page flows, and prominent call-to-action (CTA) buttons.

From understanding the power of user-friendly interfaces to cohesive layout designs that prioritize ease-of-use without sacrificing style or substance, we'll cover it all in this article. By the end, you'll be equipped with practical tips and insights to revolutionize your website's navigation in order to elevate your online presence and scale your business. Let's dive right in.

What is website navigation?   

Website navigation refers to the way visitors move through a website to find the information or services they need. It's like a map that guides users to their destination, ensuring a smooth and intuitive browsing experience.

Beyond providing easy access to information or products on your site, good navigation directly impacts user experience (UX) and conversion rates. According to Hubspot,  good website design can improve time on site by 84% . Confusing or poorly structured navigation can frustrate visitors and lead them to abandon your site entirely, resulting in the loss of potential customers.

Essential website navigation components  

Website navigation comprises various components that work together to provide a seamless browsing experience.

The text or words used in the navigation menu and link labels should be clear, concise, and descriptive, guiding users to understand their destination.

Source: Lego

Link text 

Link text helps visitors understand where they'll be directed when they click on hyperlinked text. Descriptive link text improves the navigation's usability and accessibility.

Source: Access Guide

Button 

Buttons can be used in website navigation to draw attention to specific actions or features, providing users with a direct and intuitive way to interact with the site.

Source: Justinmind

A website navigation menu organizes the links to different pages within the site. It can take the form of a horizontal navigation bar, dropdown menu, hamburger menu, vertical sidebar, or footer menu, depending on the website's design and layout. 

Here's a brief explanation of some of the important menu types:

Top menu navigation bar: It comprises a horizontal list of links, often organized into dropdown menus for subpages or categories. This type of navigation allows users to access different sections easily or pages on the website without scrolling too much.

Source: Converse

Side menu bar: Found commonly found on blogs, ecommerce websites, and content-heavy sites, the side menu usually appears as a vertical list on either the left or right-hand side of the webpage. It offers quick access to various sections or features within a website.

Source: Grace Chuang

Footer navigation: Placed at the bottom (footer) section of a webpage, these links provide additional options for users who have reached the end of a page or want quick access to essential information such as contact details, terms and conditions, privacy policy, etc.

Source: Smashing magazine

Dropdown menus:  These allow web designers to create hierarchical structures within their main navigational elements. By organizing pages into categories and subcategories under primary menu items, dropdown menus enable users to find specific content more efficiently without overwhelming them with too many choices upfront.

Source: Amazon

Breadcrumbs: Breadcrumbs display the hierarchical structure of pages within a specific category. They allow users to understand their current location within your website and provide a quick way to navigate back to previous levels or categories.

Source: Pottery Barn

Sidebars: Commonly used in blog layouts to categorize and organize content, they can include navigation links, recent posts, popular articles, and other relevant information that complements the main content.

Source: Wikipedia

Accordions: Accordions are interactive elements that expand and collapse sections of content. They are useful for displaying a large amount of information while keeping the page visually clean and easy to scan.

Source: Elfsight

By understanding these common types of navigational structures, web designers can make informed decisions about how best to organize their website's information architecture based on their target audience's needs and preferences.

Types of navigation

When it comes to website navigation, there's more than meets the eye. As websites continue to evolve, it's essential for designers to explore new ways to enhance user engagement and satisfaction.

By leveraging the power of forward, horizontal, and backward navigation, websites can provide a multidimensional experience that captivates and inspires audiences.

Forward navigation 

Forward navigation in a website refers to the process of moving from one webpage to another in a sequential order. It's like following a path or story, with each click leading you to the next logical step. This type of navigation is crucial for guiding users through the website and helping them easily find relevant information. By incorporating forward navigation effectively, website designers can create a seamless and intuitive user experience that keeps visitors engaged and encourages them to explore further.

One fascinating aspect of forward navigation is its ability to shape the user journey and steer individuals towards specific goals or actions. When well-executed, this method can direct users through a predetermined flow, leading them from landing pages to product information, FAQs, checkout processes, or any other desired destination. Incorporating clear calls-to-action at every step ensures that users stay on track and are continually guided towards their intended destinations while maintaining an exciting digital journey.

Forward navigation is particularly useful for websites with a hierarchical structure, where content is organized into different levels. It enables users to navigate through these levels and access more specific and relevant information within the same overarching topic. Whether it's diving deeper into a product catalog or exploring various aspects of a particular subject, forward navigation empowers users to explore and discover the content that matters most to them.

Horizontal navigation 

Horizontal navigation, also known as horizontal navigation, is a website design technique that involves organizing content to be accessed through left or right scrolling rather than traditional up and down scrolling. This approach can enhance user experience by making it easier for visitors to explore different sections of a website without having to navigate through multiple pages.

From a design perspective, horizontal navigation offers an opportunity for creativity and originality. By breaking away from the conventional vertical layout, web designers have the chance to experiment with new ways of presenting information and guiding users through the site's interface.

Source: Arbor Restaurant

Implementing horizontal navigation not only enriches the user experience but also increases the chances of users discovering additional valuable information on the website. By presenting related content in a seamless and accessible way, horizontal navigation adds depth and relevance to the user's browsing journey, giving a comprehensive understanding of the topic at hand.

Backward/reverse navigation 

Backward or reverse navigation is a crucial feature that allows users to return easily to previous pages or steps within a website. It enhances the user experience by providing a seamless way to backtrack and explore different paths.

One common method of backward navigation is through the use of breadcrumbs, which are navigational aids that display the hierarchical path a user has taken through a website. Breadcrumbs help users understand their location within a website's structure and provide a convenient way to retrace their steps if needed.

Backward navigation is particularly valuable in situations where users are involved in a multi-step process, such as filling out a form or completing a checkout process. It allows users to revisit previous steps easily and make any necessary changes or review information before proceeding forward.

Revolutionize user experience with these genius tips 

When it comes to designing website navigation, simplicity is key. Cluttered and complicated navigation can overwhelm users and lead to frustration. By keeping the navigation clean and user-friendly, you can ensure that visitors can easily find what they're looking for. Utilizing clear labels and intuitive placement of navigation elements can significantly enhance the user experience.

Create a sitemap 

Start by creating a sitemap , which is a hierarchical list of pages on your website. This will help you determine the organization and hierarchy of your site, making it easier for users to navigate and find what they're looking for.

Creating a sitemap isn't just about organizing content; it's about providing an intuitive and visually appealing tool for users to navigate through your website effortlessly. Incorporating search functionality and breadcrumb navigation can further elevate the user experience, resulting in increased engagement and satisfaction.

Use card sorting 

Conduct card sorting exercises to understand how users think and organize information. Making others list the different items under a broad category they deem fit can provide valuable insights into how different segments of your target audience might prefer to navigate your website.

It empowers designers to step into the shoes of their audience, gaining invaluable insights that ultimately shape an intuitive, seamless, and enjoyable browsing journey. The result? A website that not only looks good but feels tailored specifically for its users.

Here's an example:

Prioritize pages 

Based on user needs and preferences, prioritize the most important pages in your navigation. Limit the main navigation menu to seven items or fewer and use descriptive labels to enhance clarity and usability. Another valuable approach is to consider the logical flow of information and prioritize pages based on their position in the user journey.

For example, if your website aims to convert visitors into customers, prioritizing product pages or contact information ahead of secondary pages can enhance the conversion rate. Additionally, incorporating clear calls-to-action and visual hierarchy within the navigation design can further emphasize priority pages and guide users towards their intended destination.

Consider user experience  

When it comes to website navigation design, user experience should be the guiding star.  Use website heatmap and scroll map analysis, website interaction analysis , user adoption metrics, bounce rates, and others to gain insights into user experience. One often overlooked best practice is to ensure that the navigation elements are consistent across all pages of the website. This not only helps users orient themselves but also enhances usability and reduces frustration.

Additionally, leveraging intuitive labels and clear language in navigation menus can significantly improve user experience. Instead of using generic terms like Products or Services, consider incorporating more descriptive labels that resonate with your target audience.

Incorporate visual cues 

Incorporating visual cues into your website's navigation design can also greatly improve user experience. Using icons or directional arrows can help guide users through the site and quickly convey information without relying solely on text. Not only does this enhance the visual appeal of your site, but it also streamlines the browsing process, making it easier for users to find what they're looking for.

Additionally, contrasting colors can be used to create visual hierarchy, making it easier for users to distinguish between different sections of the website.

 SEO optimization and website navigation are closely intertwined components of a successful online presence. By providing a clear and hierarchical link structure, websites enable search engine bots to easily crawl and index the content, improving visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Another crucial aspect is implementing descriptive anchor text for internal links within the website. This not only helps users understand where each link will take them but also communicates valuable information to search engine crawlers about the content of the linked pages.

Mobile responsiveness   

When it comes to website navigation design, mobile responsiveness is no longer just a bonus–it’s a must-have. In addition to having a hamburger menu, incorporating touch-friendly buttons throughout your website can greatly enhance mobile usability.

Consider using touch-friendly elements and strategically placing important calls-to-action within easy reach of mobile users’ thumbs to enhance usability. Additionally, leveraging responsive grid layouts can ensure that your website design adapts seamlessly across various screen sizes, providing a consistent and user-friendly navigation experience on both desktop and mobile devices.

Accessibility guidelines   

It's not enough to design visually appealing and user-friendly navigation; it also needs to be accessible to all users, regardless of their abilities. Accessibility guidelines ensure that individuals with visual impairments, motor disabilities, or cognitive limitations can navigate websites effectively.

To achieve accessibility in website navigation, there are several best practices to follow.

Alternative text for images must be used in navigational elements. This enables screen readers to describe the image content accurately to visually impaired users.

Using proper heading structures and semantic markup helps screen readers easily navigate through the page by allowing them to understand the hierarchy of content.

Making all navigational elements easily accessible via keyboard ensures equal access for these users.

Incorporating colors with sufficient contrast between text and background allows people with visual impairments or conditions such as color blindness to distinguish different elements easily.

By following these accessibility guidelines for website navigation design, you can create an inclusive experience where everyone can access and interact with your site effectively.

Emerging trends in website navigation techniques   

In the ever-evolving world of web design, new trends and techniques are constantly emerging to enhance user experiences and make navigation more intuitive.

One such trend that has gained popularity is single-page designs with scrolling navigation. This approach allows users to seamlessly scroll through different sections of the website without having to reload or navigate to separate pages. By presenting all content on a single page, users can easily find what they're looking for by simply scrolling down.

Source : CSS Script

Another trend that has been widely adopted is sticky navigation menus. Sticky navigation refers to a fixed menu bar that remains visible always as the user scrolls through the website. This provides quick access to important links and helps users easily navigate within the site without having to scroll back up or search for the main menu again.

Source: UX Movement

Tabbed navigation is another technique that has seen an increase in usage recently. Tabbed navigation involves grouping related content into tabs, allowing users to switch between different sections of a website without reloading or navigating away from the current page. Tabs provide a clear visual hierarchy and can be particularly useful when organizing large amounts of content, making it easier for users to find what they need.

These emerging trends in navigation techniques highlight how designers are continuously pushing boundaries and re-imagining conventional ways of navigating websites.

Conclusion 

In this comprehensive guide, we've explored the importance of website navigation and provided you with practical tips on how to create intuitive and effective navigational elements for your websites. Here are some key takeaways:

Prioritize simplicity and consistency: Simplicity is the key to a successful navigation design.

Choose the right type of navigational structure: Consider different types of navigational structures. Selecting the appropriate structure will enhance usability.

Optimize for mobile responsiveness: Use mobile-friendly formats like collapsible menus or off-canvas designs.

Don't forget about SEO: Website navigation can impact search engine optimization (SEO). Ensure that search engines can easily crawl and index all pages by using HTML text links instead of JavaScript-based ones in your navigational elements.

Make it accessible: Accessible navigation benefits not only users with disabilities but also improves overall usability for everyone visiting your site.

Seize new opportunities in navigation design: Stay updated with emerging trends in website navigation techniques such as mega-menus or sticky headers.

By understanding these best practices, you can create a well-planned website navigation that contributes significantly towards meeting your business goals and ultimately results in satisfied visitors who keep coming back.

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• Open access
• Published: 16 May 2024

Non-technical skills training for Nigerian interprofessional surgical teams: a cross-sectional survey

• Barnabas Tobi Alayande 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ,
• Callum Forbes 1 , 3 ,
• Paul Kingpriest 4 ,
• Adeyinka Adejumo 5 ,
• Wendy Williams 6 ,
• Felix Wina 7 ,
• Christian Agbo Agbo 8 ,
• Bamidele Omolabake 8 ,
• Abebe Bekele 1 ,
• Bashiru O Ismaila 2 ,
• Fiona Kerray 9 ,
• Augustine Sule 2 ,
• Egide Abahuje 10 , 11 ,
• Jamie M. Robertson 12 ,
• The Non-technical Skills for Surgery Nigeria Group ,
• Steven Yule 9   na1 ,
• Robert Riviello 1 , 3 , 6 , 12   na1 &
• Mercy Isichei 2 , 13   na1  

BMC Medical Education volume  24 , Article number:  547 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

169 Accesses

2 Altmetric

Metrics details

Introduction

Non-technical skills (NTS) including communication, teamwork, leadership, situational awareness, and decision making, are essential for enhancing surgical safety. Often perceived as tangential soft skills, NTS are many times not included in formal medical education curricula or continuing medical professional development. We aimed to explore exposure of interprofessional teams in North-Central Nigeria to NTS and ascertain perceived facilitators and barriers to interprofessional training in these skills to enhance surgical safety and inform design of a relevant contextualized curriculum.

Six health facilities characterised by high surgical volumes in Nigeria’s North-Central geopolitical zone were purposively identified. Federal, state, and private university teaching hospitals, non-teaching public and private hospitals, and a not-for-profit health facility were included. A nineteen-item, web-based, cross-sectional survey was distributed to 71 surgical providers, operating room nurses, and anaesthesia providers by snowball sampling through interprofessional surgical team leads from August to November 2021. Data were analysed using Fisher’s exact test, proportions, and constant comparative methods for free text responses.

Respondents included 17 anaesthesia providers, 21 perioperative nurses, and 29 surgeons and surgical trainees, with a 95.7% survey completion rate. Over 96% had never heard of any NTS for surgery framework useful for variable resource contexts and only 8% had ever received any form of NTS training. Interprofessional teams identified communication and teamwork as the most deficient personal skills (38, 57%), and as the most needed for surgical team improvement (45, 67%). There was a very high demand for NTS training by all surgical team members (64, 96%). The main motivations for training were expectations of resultant improved patient safety and improved interprofessional team dynamics. Week-long, hybrid training courses (with combined in-person and online components) were the preferred format for delivery of NTS education. Factors that would facilitate attendance included a desire for patient safety and self-improvement, while barriers to attendance were conflicts of time, and training costs.

Conclusions

Interprofessional surgical teams in the Nigerian context have a high degree of interest in NTS training, and believe it can improve team dynamics, personal performance, and ultimately patient safety. Implementation of NTS training programs should emphasize interprofessional communication and teamworking.

Peer Review reports

Non-technical skills (NTS) are defined as a constellation of cognitive and social skills, demonstrated by teams and individuals, needed to reduce error, and to improve human performance in complex systems [ 1 ]. Derived originally from high-risk industries like aviation, aerospace, nuclear, explosive, military, and high-speed sports, these skills are essential in surgical care [ 2 ]. These skills can enhance the way surgical teams carry out surgery [ 1 ].

Failure of NTS such as situation awareness, decision making, leadership, communication and teamwork has been shown to contribute to up to half of all intra-operative errors [ 3 ]. Often considered soft skills, these competencies are many times overlooked in both formal and informal clinical training - particularly in low resource contexts where emphasis is placed on technical skills [ 4 ]. However, published literature shows that failure of NTS is a significant cause of adverse events in over 50% of all fatal medical accidents [ 5 ]. The consequence of not teaching NTS is at the heart of errors, sentinel events and near misses compromising a patient safety culture [ 6 ].

In addressing the absence of reliable ways to teach NTS, the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh, and the University of Aberdeen developed the Non-Technical Skills for Surgeons (NOTSS) framework [ 1 ]. NOTSS refers to a behaviour rating tool grounded in a skills taxonomy that permits a valid and reliable observation and assessment of situation awareness, decision making, leadership, communication, and teamwork [ 7 ]. Considered by some as the gold standard for NTS, NOTSS has been extensively used across the world to prevent or mitigate surgical errors [ 8 ].

Even though up to 76 different published tools have been used to measure NTS in seven distinct areas of clinical practice, NTS training has been largely restricted to the high-income context [ 8 , 9 ]. Through a mixed methods approach involving Rwandan surgeons, anaesthetists, and nurses, the NOTSS behaviour rating system was modified for use in a variable resource context [ 4 ]. Non-Technical Skills for Surgery in Variable Resource Context (NOTSS-VRC) is targeted to address variability in resources, staff, systems support, and language frequently encountered by surgical teams in low- and middle-income countries [ 10 ]. The key modifications in NOTSS-VRC have been in the inclusion of contextual indicative behaviours that address this variability [ 4 , 10 , 11 ]. Other NTS courses have been designed for low-resource settings such as the Vital Anaesthesia Simulation Training (VAST) and SAFE Operating Room Course [ 12 , 13 , 14 ].

Although Nigeria and Rwanda are both sub-Saharan African countries and share some commonalities, they are different in regional location (West versus East Africa), working languages of healthcare teams, health system organization, specific kinds of resource variability, and availability of NTS training. Currently, there is no identified programme holistically offering training or continuing medical education using this framework for surgery, obstetrics, trauma, anaesthesia, or nursing in West Africa. This survey was designed to gather input from health professionals and trainees working in North-Central Nigeria on the need for NTS for surgery specific to surgeons, perioperative nurses, and anaesthetists.

Before modifying or implementing any NTS training program, it is important to assess the interest, preparedness, and training preferences of the local Nigerian workforce. A bespoke survey was developed to evaluate this by our multidisciplinary group of local researchers collaborating with the NOTSS global team consisting of clinical educators, surgeons, anaesthetists, a clinical psychologist, nurses, and surgical safety and human factors trainees [ 11 ]. A well-designed NTS program should be highly contextualized and meet the needs of the target healthcare workers [ 15 ]. The focus of the survey was to identify trained surgical providers’ current exposure to NTS and highlight the perceived needs and preferences of local surgical teams to guide the design of training modules on NTS for the Nigerian variable resource context.

The survey design adhered to the Checklist for Reporting Results of Internet E-Surveys (CHERRIES) [ 16 ]. It was primarily a quantitative survey with a section for qualitative written responses. The voluntary survey was designed by a local team of surgical providers with training in NOTSS-VRC from Rwanda. Mentorship for the design was provided by the multidisciplinary and trans-sectoral NOTSS Global team. The survey was targeted at the 133 surgical providers, anaesthesia providers, and perioperative nurses working within six purposively selected institutions in North-Central Nigeria, spanning a wide variety of facility type and governance. These facilities included a non-profit secondary facility with focus on HIV-related surgical care, a private tertiary health facility, a specialist hospital, a state government-owned teaching hospital, a non-teaching federal medical centre, and a federal government-owned teaching hospital. These facilities were selected for their high surgical volumes and the presence of a multidisciplinary and interprofessional surgical team. Using a 95% confidence interval and an 8% margin of error, a representative sample of 71 out of 133 was selected through a convenience, stratified snowball technique at each institution, starting from the head of surgery, the lead perioperative nurse, or the lead anaesthesia provider. We elected to use convenience sampling to select surgical team leads based on their accessibility and availability to the researchers. Rather than being drawn at random from a larger population, in this strategy, participants were picked because they are easily available to the research team and would be able to influence propagation of the survey as leaders. We then stratified these leaders by their speciality into nursing team leads, surgical heads of department, and anaesthesia heads of department so that all cadres within the operating room are represented. The rational for the stratified snowball method was that these leaders would be able to identify and connect us to their peers who worked in interprofessional teams at the selected hospitals more effectively.

Ethical clearance for the NTS study was obtained from the Jos University Teaching Hospital, Nigeria Institutional Review Board (JUTH/DCS/IREC/127/XXXI/2277). Informed consent was obtained from participants prior to taking the approximately 7-minute survey. Participants were informed of the purpose of the survey, introduced to the primary investigator, and told the approximate length of time needed to fill the survey prior to consent. The survey consisted of close-ended questions (for quantitative analysis) and a free text response component (for qualitative analysis). The role of the individual on the surgical team, previous knowledge about NTS for surgery and NOTSS-VRC, and details of any prior training were collected. Respondents’ perceptions of the importance of constructs of situation awareness, decision making, leadership, communication and teamwork in the Nigerian context, and their perception of the single most important NTS for personal and team improvement were identified. The survey also identified interest in formal training in NTS, the perceived benefits of NTS. In addition, the survey collected responses on the ideal duration and format for a NTS training program (in person versus online versus blended). A free text section collected hindrances and enabling factors for participating in NTS training.

Names, demographic information, and institutional affiliation were not collected. No personal information was collected or stored. Information was collected using a restricted Google form, and unauthorized access was prevented by limiting editing rights to three investigators. Respondents were able to review and change their answers using a back button. Access to collected data was only permitted on password-protected computer devices. The survey was developed through an iterative process, and the usability and technical functionality of the electronic questionnaire was pre-tested before dissemination. The open survey was not advertised online but was disseminated to surgical, obstetrics, anaesthesia, and perioperative nursing leads at target facilities. The survey was limited to clinically active participants. Initial contact with potential participants was made on WhatsApp, and the forms required web-based data entry. No cookies, IP address check, or automated log file analysis was performed; however, data were cleaned manually and examined for double entries and other inconsistencies including submissions with atypical timestamps.

Surveys were administered through an electronic, web-based, single-page Google form with 19 questionnaire items, and responses were automatically captured. No incentives were provided to any participants. Data were collected from August 9 to October 6, 2021. Items and questionnaires were not randomized or alternated. A post-submission completeness check was carried out, finding that 6 respondents had incomplete entries. The response rate was 95.7% ( n  = 68; N  = 71); and the completion rate (the number of people submitting the last questionnaire page, divided by the number of people who agreed to participate or submitted the first survey page) was also 95.7% ( n  = 68; N  = 71). Any questionnaires with less than 50% completion, or with missing demographics ( n  = 4) were excluded from analysis. Questionnaire items were not weighted, and propensity scores were not applied to adjust for any sample. Analysis was carried out in R software version 4.1.0 [ 17 ] using proportions and Fisher’s exact test. We analysed free text written responses to identify barriers and enhancers to NTS training in the context and generated themes using the qualitative constant comparative method as described by Glaser [ 18 ]. Responses were quantised by theme and presented by frequency and percentage alongside quotes of sample phrases. We used group open coding involving one investigator and a research assistant (BA and PK) and resolved disagreements by discussion. Qualitative analysis was carried out using a grounded theory qualitative approach and a constructivist research paradigm and a convergent (parallel) design [ 19 ]. The free text data were analysed using topic detection/categorisation technique which employs grouping or bucketing of similar themes relevant for the project [ 19 ]. No sub-categories were identified. Inductive qualitative analysis was carried out [ 18 ]. For the two open-ended questions from the survey, we categorized the text into a number of similar themes in an inductive manner [ 18 , 19 ].

There was a total of 67 respondents, which included 17 anaesthesia providers (25.4%), 21 perioperative nurses (31.3%), and 29 surgeons and surgeons-in-training (43.3%).

Overall, there was poor awareness of NTS across all specialties (Table  1 ), with only 32 of 67 (47.8%) having heard of NTS use in surgery. This shortfall in awareness was most evident amongst the anaesthesia providers with only 6 of 17 (35.3%) having previously heard of NTS, compared with 13 of 29 (44.8%) of surgical providers, and 13 of 21 (61.9%) of perioperative nursing staff. Similarly, awareness of NOTSS-VRC training was low with only 14 (21.2%) having previously heard of any NTS course adapted for variable resource contexts. This was particularly true of surgeons/surgeons-in-training relative to other professions ( p  = 0.022), as only 2 (6.9%) had prior knowledge of the course. Only 6 respondents (9.1%), none of whom were surgeons, had previously attended a NTS training program ( p  = 0.031). The NTS training courses that respondents specified that they had attended previously were not purely NTS training, as they were exclusively local hospital or university-based training sessions rather than internationally recognised training courses. One respondent identified a ‘handling and maintenance of minimally invasive instruments’ training course as containing NTS.

When asked to rate each of the components of NTS in terms of importance, all categories were rated predominantly as ‘very important’ (86.6–91.0%). None of the NTS categories were rated as ‘not important’ by any of the respondents. In ranking the four categories (Table  2 ), overall, most respondents (38, 56.7%) ranked ‘communication and teamwork’ as the one they would most personally like to learn about and ‘situational awareness’ as the least. This held true across specialties with no statistically significant difference between groups’ ranking of the categories. In addition, respondents perceived that ‘communication and teamwork’ were most needed for interprofessional team improvement in their context. Deviating from other surgeons and anaesthesia providers, nursing staff ranked decision making as less important than leadership; however, this was not statistically significant (Fisher’s exact p -value = 0.055).

There was an overwhelming positive interest in receiving NTS training in the future with 64 respondents (95.5%) expressing a desire to attend training. Their primary motivation was that NTS training would improve patient safety (66; 98.5%). Table  3 shows the preferred duration and format for NTS training.

The most common thematic barriers to respondents attending NTS training in the future included time conflicts (31, 46.3%), and cost barriers (14, 20.9%). Lack of access to training (10, 14.9%) and an unsupportive work environment (9, 13.4%) such as hierarchical dynamics and work-related psychological stress were also identified as key barriers (Table  4 ). Seventeen respondents (25.4%) identified no barriers to attending future NTS training. The most common enabling factor for attending future NTS training was the desire to improve patient safety (34, 50.7%). The desire for self-improvement (18, 26.9%) and the desire for an improved work environment (10, 14.9%) were also identified as key enabling factors. Five respondents (7.5%) could not highlight any factors which would motivate them to attend a future NTS training course.

Most respondents from operating room teams in North-Central Nigeria had never heard of any NTS for surgery framework useful for variable resource contexts and only 8% had ever received any form of NTS training. Interprofessional teams identified communication and teamwork as the most deficient personal skills (38, 57%), and as the most needed for surgical team improvement (45, 67%). There was a very high demand for NTS training by all surgical team members motivated by expectations of improved patient safety and improved interprofessional team dynamics. Week-long, hybrid training courses (with combined in-person and online components) were the preferred format for delivery of NTS education. Factors that would facilitate attendance included a desire for patient safety and self-improvement, while barriers to attendance were conflicts of time, and training costs. The way forward for NTS training in North-Central Nigerian context is interprofessional training in hybrid format which prioritizes communication and teamwork, emphasizes patient safety, and is delivered at low costs.

There is very limited exposure to surgical-team centred NTS frameworks and training in Nigeria, and across West Africa. This is in contrast with the United Kingdom, North America, East Africa, Australasia, Europe, Japan, Malaysia and Sri Lanka, where NOTSS is taught regularly as an integral part of the surgical training programs and continuing medical education [ 20 ]. In the Nigerian context, there appears to be emphasis on technical skills over NTS. Over 2,500 Nigerian surgical specialists have been trained by the Nigeria Postgraduate Medical College of Nigeria (NPMCN) and the West African College of Surgeons (WACS), neither of which include structured NTS as a part of their curricula [ 21 , 22 , 23 ]. Nursing care training in the context also lacks emphasis on measurable, contextualized NTS [ 24 ]. Lack of exposure to these crucial interprofessional skills in regional medical education creates a significant gap in training and practice that needs to be addressed. While systems issues are a major challenge in this context, and much effort goes into handling surgical systems challenges like supply chain, human resources, surgical access, and surgical financing [ 25 ], this pragmatic emphasis can lead to a neglect of human factors and NTS. Our survey findings show that poor NTS have been identified as a challenge by interprofessional surgical teams, but training solutions have not yet been identified in the context.

Communication and teamwork were identified as the most important NTSs needed in the Nigerian surgical environment for personal development, team building, and improvement of patient care. The Nigerian health care scene has been a minefield of unhealthy interprofessional rivalry between cadres of health workers [ 26 , 27 , 28 ]. This has been responsible for a lack of cooperation, a sense of unwholesome hierarchy, mistrust, and fear that often carries itself into the operating room [ 27 ]. These age-old challenges have led to recurrent industrial actions, and counter-industrial actions, organizational tensions [ 26 , 27 , 29 ]. Respondents suggest prioritizing training in communication and teamwork over training in other cognitive aspects of NTS (situation awareness and decision making) as the way forward in the Nigerian context. The Nigerian healthcare system can potentially be enhanced with interprofessional education (IPE) and collaboration [ 30 ]. Early, multidisciplinary NTS training is a potential approach to addressing these aspects of the Nigerian surgical, and larger, medical practice space.

Longer-term training was suggested as the ideal format for NTS training in Nigeria. Designing NTS training courses to last for one week, as opposed to a few hours or 2–3 days was strongly suggested by respondents. This might reflect the recognition of the magnitude of exposure necessary to fill the gaps in NTS that have been identified in the context [ 26 , 28 ]. Although financial incentives rank low as a facilitator, we cannot tell how much this might contribute to the desire for a longer training course. In this context where provider to patient ratio is significantly low [ 21 ], it will be challenging to ask clinical providers to leave their clinical duties for a one-week stretch for any type of training. Interval training of two to three days duration twice to thrice a year would be an acceptable compromise to meet provider expectations, while being sensitive to workload, and avoiding the fatigue of an extended course [ 31 ].

In-person training appears to have fallen out of favour with respondents as the majority (70.1%) preferred a hybrid approach. This is likely connected with lessons learned by the global community during the COVID-19 pandemic [ 32 ]. It is now accepted that high quality education and training can be carried out remotely, via online platforms. Strictly online courses introduce the challenge of wide internet bandwidth, high cost of internet data in Low- and Middle- Income Countries, and the challenges of online learning. The in-person component of blended courses will give the opportunity to include practical, non-didactic components like direct observation and evaluation of learners’ intraoperative NTS in a live operating space for a limited resource setting. Despite the availability of technology solutions including augmented reality, extended virtual reality, and machine learning, they are difficult to implement in a limited resource setting with poor quality internet [ 33 ]. Respondents see blended NTS courses as the way forward.

Highest priority barriers included the perioperative and institutional work environment (59.7%), and lack of funding to pay for NTS courses (20.9%). Other courses in Low- and Middle- Income Countries have identified similar barriers [ 34 ]. Surgical staff believed that NTS training would “clash with normal duties” or be limited by the “tight schedule of a residency training programme” or that they would not be released to attend trainings by their employers. This can be understood in the light of the low Surgeon Anaesthesia and Obstetrician specialist density in Nigeria (1.8 per 100,000), and the significant impact time away from work for development has on increasing the patient backlog [ 35 ]. Attending such courses can easily be seen as disruptions of patient care. Optimizing the work environment, and leadership buy-in are therefore key to preparing surgical staff for a NTS training in this context [ 36 ]. Setting up sponsored courses would also encourage engagement. Using mixed methods, Reis et al. found that lack of time, perception of overload at work, inadequate digital infrastructure or competence, and a variety of motivational and emotional elements were barriers to continuing medical education courses among primary care providers [ 37 ]. Our findings show that highest priority facilitators were essentially altruistic ideologies undergirding the motivation for NTS training. These include desire for improved patient safety, self-improvement, and improvements in work environment, as opposed to funding and financial incentives or the need for a certificate. Surgeons, anaesthesia providers, and perioperative nurses in the Nigerian context understand the priority of patient safety. Introduction of a multidisciplinary, interprofessional NTS curriculum that is sensitive to these felt needs is important for successful NOTSS-VRC training in this context. Preliminary results have been presented as an abstract at the American College of Surgeons Conference, 2022 [ 38 ].

Limitations

Although this work sampled surgical service providers at secondary and tertiary level facilities, some surgical services (circumcision, debridement, initial open fracture care, incision, and drainage of abscesses etc.), are also being provided at primary level in Nigeria and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa and were not included in this survey. In addition, this survey was purposively limited to North-Central Nigeria due to maximize resources and connections. It could have been distributed to a broader population for more representative national data. Further studies involving providers at this level may provide a more holistic understanding of motivations for NTS training. Secondly, challenges of internet access in an LMIC like Nigeria might bias results, as only surgical providers, anaesthesiologists, and nurses with internet access or internet enabled devices could have responded. The likelihood of exposure to NTS may be higher among those with internet enabled devices, considering the increase in online education following the COVID-19 pandemic. Future research should consider hybrid online and interviewer-administered paper surveys to ensure a more representative sample.

Surgical teams in North-Central Nigeria are highly motivated for NTS training. Multi-disciplinary and inter professional teams consisting of perioperative nurses, anaesthesia providers, and surgeons believe that NTS skill development can improve patient safety, team dynamics, and personal performance. In the context of Nigeria, implementation should emphasize communication and teamwork to address the tensions and interprofessional rivalry noted in the local work culture. A hybrid, low-cost approach to training (combining online and in-person components) is preferred by respondents. Optimizing the work environment and ensuring that hospital and theatre leadership teams buy into the programs and champion NTS training are key to successful NOTSS-VRC training in this context. The way forward for NTS training in North-Central Nigeria is hybrid, low cost, inter professional training with an emphasis on teamwork and communication for improved patient outcomes and surgical safety.

Availability of data and materials

The dataset used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Abbreviations

Interprofessional education

Non-technical skills

Non-Technical Skills for Surgeons

Non-Technical Skills for Surgery in Variable Resource Context

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Acknowledgements

Steven Yule, Robert Riviello, and Mercy Isichei are co-senior authors, with equivalent contributions.

The Non-technical Skills for Surgery Nigeria Group

Barnabas Tobi Alayande 1,2,3,4

Callum Forbes 1,3

Paul KingPriest 4

Adeyinka Adejumo 5

Felix Wina 7

Christian Agbo Agbo 8

Bamidele Omolabake 8

Bashiru O Ismaila 2

Augustine Sule 2

Egide Abahuje 10,11

Robert Riviello 1,3,6,12

Mercy Isichei 2,14

Tosin Abah 4

Akims Shattah 2

Linus Hapiyati Homoweto 4

John Onyeji 15

Joseph Okoko 16

Joshua Sule 16

1 Center for Equity in Global Surgery, University of Global Health Equity, Rwanda

2 Department of Surgery, Jos University Teaching Hospital, Nigeria

3 Program in Global Surgery and Social Change, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

4 Surgical Equity Research Hub, Jos, Nigeria

5 Federal Medical Centre, Keffi, Nasarawa State, Nigeria

6 Center for Surgery and Public Health, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

7 Department of Surgery, Bingham University Teaching Hospital, Jos, Nigeria

8 Department of Surgery, Benue State University Teaching Hospital, Markudi, Nigeria

9 Department of Clinical Surgery, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

10 University of Rwanda, Kigali, Rwanda

11 Department of Surgery, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, United States of America

12 Department of Surgery, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

13 The Faith Alive Foundation, Jos, Nigeria

14 Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Bingham University Teaching Hospital, Jos, Nigeria

15 Garki Specialist Hospital, Abuja, Nigeria

16 Oasis Medical Center, Jos, Nigeria

Barnabas Alayande was funded for this research by the Association for Academic Surgery/Association for Academic Surgery Foundation Global Surgery Research Fellowship Award 2021. AAS had no direct involvement in the design of the study, data collection, analysis, and interpretation of data, and in writing the manuscript.

Author information

Steven Yule, Robert Riviello and Mercy Isichei contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

Center for Equity in Global Surgery, University of Global Health Equity, Kigali, Rwanda

Barnabas Tobi Alayande, Callum Forbes, Abebe Bekele & Robert Riviello

Department of Surgery, Jos University Teaching Hospital, Jos, Nigeria

Barnabas Tobi Alayande, Bashiru O Ismaila, Augustine Sule & Mercy Isichei

Program in Global Surgery and Social Change, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States of America

Barnabas Tobi Alayande, Callum Forbes & Robert Riviello

Surgical Equity Research Hub, Jos, Nigeria

Barnabas Tobi Alayande & Paul Kingpriest

Federal Medical Centre, Keffi, Nasarawa State, Nigeria

Adeyinka Adejumo

Center for Surgery and Public Health, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA, United States of America

Wendy Williams & Robert Riviello

Department of Surgery, Bingham University Teaching Hospital, Jos, Nigeria

Department of Surgery, Benue State University Teaching Hospital, Markudi, Nigeria

Christian Agbo Agbo & Bamidele Omolabake

Department of Clinical Surgery, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Fiona Kerray & Steven Yule

University of Rwanda, Kigali, Rwanda

Egide Abahuje

Department of Surgery, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ilinois, United States of America

Department of Surgery, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA, United States of America

Jamie M. Robertson & Robert Riviello

The Faith Alive Foundation, Jos, Nigeria

Mercy Isichei

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• Barnabas Tobi Alayande
• , Callum Forbes
• , Paul Kingpriest
• , Adeyinka Adejumo
• , Bamidele Omolabake
• , Bashiru O Ismaila
• , Augustine Sule
• , Egide Abahuje
• , Robert Riviello
• , Mercy Isichei
• , Tosin Abah
• , Akims Shattah
• , Linus Hapiyati Homoweto
• , John Onyeji
• , Joseph Okoko
•  & Joshua Sule

Contributions

B.T. made substantial contributions to study conceptualization, design of the survey, acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data, and contributed to drafting and reviewing the work. C.F., and P.K. contributed to the acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data contributed substantially to the original draft and substantively revised it. The Non-technical Skills for Surgery Nigeria Group was involved in the acquisition, interpretation of data, and substantively revising the work. A.A., S.F.W., C.A.A., B.O.I., B.O. acquired and interpreted data and substantially revised the draft. W.W., F.K., A.S., E.A., J.M.R. made substantial contributions to interpretation of data, and substantially revised the manuscript. A.B., S.Y., R.R., and M.I. made substantial contributions to survey conceptualization, design of the work, validation, supervising the survey and substantively revising the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Barnabas Tobi Alayande .

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Ethical clearance for the NTS study was obtained from the Jos University Teaching Hospital, Nigeria Institutional Review Board (JUTH/DCS/IREC/127/XXXI/2277). Informed consent was obtained from participants prior to taking the 7-minute survey. Participants were informed of the purpose of the survey, introduced to the primary investigator, and told the approximate length of time needed to fill the survey prior to consent. The study was performed in accordance with relevant local guidelines and regulations, and in accordance to the Declaration of Helsinki.

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Alayande, B.T., Forbes, C., Kingpriest, P. et al. Non-technical skills training for Nigerian interprofessional surgical teams: a cross-sectional survey. BMC Med Educ 24 , 547 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-024-05550-8

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-024-05550-8

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