I am currently a web designer and would like to share from my own education experience in the past. I took a web design & multimedia course for start. Then the next level, learn a bit of web programming like php, mySQL by myself. This will help you make a website more functional. And the end of the day, you may learn about interent marketing, to promote your website that you work on to the world. Making a website is not hard as promoting them.

if i wanted to go the college route, what courses would i take? what should i major in?

You can start the process by going to:

http://www.how-to-build-websites.com

Hope that helps,

Stefan

Im really interested in web design. I was wondering if im going the right way cause i think im learining too much im still in college i will graduate in 2 years with a Bachelors in Computer Information Systems i have been working on Dreamweaver, Fireworks, a little Flash, Photoshop, and i know HTML, CSS, basic PHP and im thinking of learning Javascript. If you could give me some advice it will help a lot.

Thank You

The purpose of the below is to provide both a general understanding of the types of websites that exist and to also offer some assistance in deciding what type of website would meet your particular needs.
Hobby / Individual Website

Usually of a non-commercial basis and very often built using the free or no-cost “build your own website” tools – it is shown here for completeness, although it is fair to say that WEBcouk rarely get asked to become involved and design this sort of website. The exception would perhaps be where there is a long term plan to gain sufficient visitors for some sort of advertising to start generating revenue, i.e. Google Adsense; and / or a more professionally designed web presence was required.
Informational Website

Any website whose design goal is to inform the user and is not directly involved with selling product – these types of website are suitable for the individual entrepreneur through to the sole trader / small partnership right up to the largest corporate.

For the sole trader who has to start somewhere but doesn’t quite know where, this type of website can be based on an existing business card and / or brochure that may already exist; and may involve the design of a new logo.

At the other end of the spectrum, a larger business would probably want to use as a starting point existing logos, styles and graphics together with a whole raft of company material that already exists. A firm website design concept may or may not be available at the start of this type of web site project – it doesn’t really matter one way or the other.

An informational website could also include a product catalogue style of presentation, (much like an ecommerce website), without any intention of making a direct sale.

This type of website design is usually, but not necessarily, targeted at a particular audience

Dependant on the frequency and scale of content changes anticipated on an ongoing basis, a Content Management System, (CMS) can easily be integrated into an informational website in order to minimise future costs.
Commercial – Ecommerce Website

In a nutshell, a website intended to sell products and / or services direct to the customer with payments typically being made online using a credit card and / or Paypal. A subscription based website would also be included in this category.

Although one of the easiest types of website to relate to, one of the most important in terms of revenue and growth opportunity. Also, any number of information pages can be incorporated into this type of web site design.
Entertainment & Leisure Website

These are many and varied, the most obvious being hobby forums, (i.e. fishing, collectibles, photography etc. etc.), online gaming websites or many that are completely quirky!
Service Website

We went round and round in circles trying to get a heading that summed up this type of website design and in the end felt it best to stick with something simple and just give some example. In practice, the examples below could either be standalone websites or be incorporated as part of another website.

Event Planning – from a database of events allow the user to select and package together a unique day out

Greetings Cards – allow a bespoke and unique card to be tailored and sent to an individual, together with optionally remembering birthdays and anniversaries for the future

Don’t you Dare – a clever and sleek advertising website that allows the end user to select a spot on the website to advertise and then upload their own advert for display within a pre-defined date range

We could go on and on – this type of website is only limited by the imagination and of course the budget and any deadline that may exist.
Website Costs – a rule of thumb

As a general rule, informational websites tend to be lower in cost than commercial websites and commercial websites tend to be lower in cost than service websites. Although like any rule of thumb, this can easily fall apart, for example a highly designed twenty page website could easily cost more than a focussed and functional ecommerce website.

Another tip I would give is to really get stuck into a particular platform at least to start choose that platform (such as PHP and MySQL) and dont worry about others.

I’d say that if you want to go more design side of things then some college basis should do but I would defiantly recommend you WILL need some programming skills or at least the basics. PHP as Stefan recommends is a great language to learn not just for the web but programming in general I’d say. Learn HTML, CSS, some javascript and then once your comfortable with these keep up with the trends.

If its more the development (programming) side of things then a lot more formal education will suite better to understand the software engineering and programming concepts in more detail.

I personally opted for the second option as I’m not so much the arty type!

Just to clarify further for you though Stefan did an excellent job above. A web programmer or developer is the person that makes a site do magic things like processing data, performing searches etc. A designer is usually the person that is responsible for the sites presentation as you would imagine these two roles are very closely interrelated in the web development world.

Bigger projects may have each role covered by seperate people, however smaller projects will be expected to have both roles covered by the same person. This prehaps is something else you need to look into to see who your possible employer or clients may be or what partnerships you can forge. You often find that developers are in need of designers and visa versa as is certainly the case with myself, in these kinds of situations two freelancers can work closly together calling on one another when the others assistance is required.

I may only be young and so certainly cannot put myself in your exact situation but I hope my past 5 or so years of experience can be of help.

P