Learn how to code webpages using HTML and CSS, from structuring and tagging content to styling and making the pages responsive. Upload and make your websites live using FTP.
Take your CSS skills to the next level with this comprehensive training course. Learn about advanced topics such as SVG, CSS variables, gradients, shadows, positioning, transitions, transforms, responsive images, and more to help you code bprofessional-looking webpages.
Learn how to use CSS flexbox and grid to layout and align webpage content and make it adapt to different size screens. See how both of these newer CSS techniques are useful and when to use each. You’ll also learn how to use Bootstrap (which uses Flexbox) to build out layouts quickly.
Learn how to make your webpages more dynamic and engaging with JavaScript and animations using GreenSock. From the fundamentals of JavaScript code to creating stunning animations with GSAP, this course will equip you with the skills to transform your web projects into complex, interactive designs.
Start learning Figma for UI/UX design. Gain a solid understanding of its capabilities, from creating files, to designing on a grid, working with text/photos/colors, creating components, building prototypes, exporting assets, sharing files, creating animations, and more.
In this certificate program, you will become a well-rounded Web Designer and learn to design webpages, code them with HTML & CSS, and JavaScript, and build websites with WordPress, allowing you to create a diverse portfolio to showcase your skills to potential employers or clients.
Learn the skills to become a UX/UI Designer. This course covers design concepts, industry tools like Figma, and research methodologies. Get career-focused training, build a portfolio, and receive one-on-one mentoring and prepare for a career in UX/UI design.
Gain essential skills in UI design for websites and mobile apps, including composition, typography, color, and attention to interactivity. Develop a portfolio showcasing your design projects and earn a NY State-approved certificate in UI Design.
Learn front-end web development with HTML & CSS, and JavaScript, and gain skills in building responsive websites for any screen size. Additionally, learn how to use WordPress, the world's leading content management system, to create customizable websites and edit content without coding experience.
Web design is the craft (and art) of determining how a website is to look and arranging all its component parts into an intelligible and attractive whole. Those elements include far more than text: images, both static and animated, embedded videos, and things like carousel banners on homepages all come under the Web Designer’s purview. Everything you see on the screen has gone through the Designer’s hands; what you don’t see is, on the other hand, the province of the Web Developer.
Web design dates back as far as the inception of the World Wide Web, which has only been around since 1989. At that time, webpages were static entities that didn’t do much besides sit there on your screen waiting to be read, since reading documents was the initial purpose of the World Wide Web. That changed with the popularization of the internet in the early 1990s. Scripting languages (especially JavaScript) were introduced, allowing the creation of dynamic websites with which the user could interact. As the use of the internet expanded exponentially, so did the importance of a well-designed website, especially as ecommerce became the rule and people began to expect to be able to shop for everything from gift wrap to gifts to wrap in it by hitting a few keys and giving the mouse a few perfunctory clicks.
Most recently, web design has been revolutionized by the advent of the smartphone. People now have mini-computers in their pockets that allow them to surf the web wherever they may find themselves. This has necessitated that websites fit onto the screen of a mobile phone, and has led to the “mobile first” conception of web design: designers now begin by creating the version of the site that’s viewable on smartphones, and then resize it for desktop and laptop computers. You should stay tuned for the next big development in web design, as the field changes with startling rapidity.
Obviously, web design training prepares you for being a Web Designer who designs websites. It’s a good career, especially for artistic types who want to be able to put their visual sensibilities to work in a world that is increasingly not interested in art for art’s sake. You get to be very creative as a Web Designer; it’s even a job with a blue sky aspect. You can start your design process by assuming that everything is possible, at least until the developer steps in and tells you that there’s no way to code your last brilliant idea.
There is nothing to say that you can’t go beyond web design and acquire the skills of a Web Developer. That can mean learning to code, or it can mean learning to use a CMS (content management system) such as WordPress, Wix, or Squarespace to facilitate website construction. What makes this interesting to a Web Designer is that it can lead you to be a two-in-one Designer/developer who can handle the design and the construction of entire websites. There is a market for such people, especially among smaller organizations that can’t afford a whole team of web developers.
A further possibility is to offer your design skills to family, friends, and your favorite pizzeria. People and small businesses alike need websites, and knowing how to design them (and, even better, design and construct them) can easily become a side hustle. You’ll get some brownie points being the family website guru, and that pizzeria may pay you for your services with free pizza for a year.
Web design curricula will vary from school to school, but there are some basic topics that every course will include, including the basic tools of the trade, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Without at least those, you can’t hope to create anything in the way of web design. This kind of technical knowledge is in addition to the design skills you’re going to need for the creative side of your career.
HTML is the foundational language of the World Wide Web. You simply cannot build a website without it, as it’s the thing that tells your browser where the components of your website should go on the screen. The acronym stands for HyperText Markup Language—hypertext being not text that can't sit still, but, rather, text that’s displayed from the internet that contains [hyper]links. Markup refers to simple languages that show how text is to be displayed. Although it’s not as essential as HTML, CSS (which stands for Cascading Style Sheets) makes an extremely handy adjunct to it, and is nearly always used to add such visually interesting elements as colors and fonts to a piece of bland hypertext.
Both of these languages (truth be told, neither is a complete computer language) are easy to learn. There are but 140-odd HTML tags, which can be easily assimilated. Although they’re not design tools per se, an understanding of HTML and CSS is vital to grasping what is possible on a webpage.
In addition to HTML and CSS, the third language essential to the client-side of websites is JavaScript. As the name makes clear, JavaScript is a scripting language, meaning that it’s something along the lines of a helper language. Its job is to collaborate with your web browser to create interactive and dynamic websites. Unlike HTML and CSS, JavaScript is a full-fledged Turing-complete computer language. Although Brendan Eich, the language's inventor, never anticipated it, JavaScript is used today for everything from building the server sides of websites to programming devices on the Internet of Things (IoT), the network of those “smart” devices with which your home is increasingly full. Your web design class will no doubt concentrate on the front-end uses of JavaScript, but this introduction to the language will, as a bonus, teach you programming concepts and commands that you’ll be able to build upon if you want to learn how to program back ends and hang out a Full Stack Developer shingle.
Unlike the coding languages just mentioned, these are more up the Designer’s alley. Figma is not the purple dragon who hangs out at Epcot in Walt Disney World. It’s a web application that allows groups of people to create, review, and perfect user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design. It makes collaborative design possible, using prototyping tools and a vector graphics editor. It’s not so much a design tool as a place where design can take place, and it's particularly useful for teams that are collaborating on the design of a website.
UX and UI are twin aspects of web design that precede the mapping out of a site. Of the two, UX is the harder to define, as it’s the stage at which the “feel” of the website is created. UI is more practically specific and encompasses defining the structure and functionality of the part of a website with which the user interacts. A proficient Web Designer should know something about both UX and UI design. Your design class will undoubtedly touch upon both subjects.
Flexbox and Grid are two CSS modules that are used for webpage layout. Flexbox works one dimension at a time (the two dimensions being rows and columns), while Grid is just what it says it is, and sets up a grid upon which the different elements of your website can be arranged. Both are effective means of managing the constituent pieces of your webpage, and, while there are other paths to the same destination, these two are probably the most popular. Although they’re often used individually, they’re not mutually exclusive, and complex websites often take advantage of both modules. Your course will teach you to use both as means of organizing and laying out your designs.
In addition to taking the coding route, there's another way to design, map out, and even construct websites: using a content management system. WordPress is the best-known example of a CMS, although other products in the class include Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify. The point of a CMS is that it allows you to create a website without having to get all that coding dirt under your fingernails. They, therefore, greatly facilitate the execution of a web design, although they’re not totally idiot-proof, and some of them can be a bit user-unfriendly. With some instruction (which you’ll receive in your web design course), you’ll be able to create some very attractive things indeed using WordPress—sometimes even more elaborate and handsome than what you could create by coding the website yourself.
In addition to the technologies outlined above, a web design class will teach you the basics of design theory for website creation. A “soft” skill in that it’s not quantifiable, design theory is nonetheless essential for good web design. Some courses go back to the beginning and teach basic design principles such as color theory before moving along to their application to specifically web-oriented processes; others begin further down the road. Either way, you’re going to need to have some degree of innate artistic sensitivity to make it as a Web Designer, but a good class will help you focus and hone those abilities into something you can use professionally.
Harder than opening a can of Livermush. Easier than explaining Livermush to someone who’s not from your part of North Carolina.
As tech subjects go, web design is one of the easier topics to learn, mostly because it’s not that techy a subject in the first place. The coding requirements are HTML, CSS, and modest amounts of JavaScript, none of which is especially difficult to learn, and even creative, design-type right-brained people can grasp them. The truly challenging part of web design is the visually creative aspect of the discipline, which depends on your having the proper aesthetic sensibilities to create something that’s as attractive to the eye as it is functional. Thus, being a Web Designer depends as much on your innate artistic abilities as it does on your technological skills.
There is, of course, a difference between learning enough about a subject to be qualified for an entry-level position and truly mastering it. Your web design course will teach you the former; the latter only comes with experience and more hard work as you become exposed to new concepts and technologies. Your aesthetic sense will also increase with experience as you learn both what’s possible and what works and what doesn’t.
That depends on you and how your brain is configured. For people who are quick at picking up tech concepts, the creative design part of the course may be the more challenging. For those who are on the phobic side when it comes to learning new tech things, that’s going to be your major challenge, as, no matter how artistically gifted you are, you’re not going to be much of a Web Designer if you haven’t mastered HTML and have some understanding of CSS and JavaScript. Either way, you’re going to have to open yourself to some new concepts and challenge yourself, although the challenge probably won’t be as great as sending up the next SpaceX rocket.
To attain basic knowledge of all the skills required to be a Web Designer (HTML, CSS, rudimentary JavaScript, UX and UI concepts, and design fundamentals), you won’t need all that much time. An immersive full-time course could have you ready for the job market in under two months. That means working hard at it, both in and out of class; you’ll be tired by the time you’re finished, but it certainly can be done. If you want to tackle the various subjects in a less intensive setting with evening or weekend classes, you’re going to need more time. Six months should certainly do the trick. Do note that these are timeframes for achieving basic competency in the field. Truly mastering web design will require considerable on-the-job experience and further training. You can’t expect to become an expert at anything in two months, but you can acquire the know-how to embark on a new professional (ad)venture.
If you want to learn something—anything from how to deep-fry a turkey to how to change a tire on a NASCAR vehicle—you have a choice of ways to learn it. You can be totally old-school and buy the book and teach yourself, or you can involve a teacher. If you go the teacher route, you have three options at your disposal: learning in a live classroom, learning in a virtual online classroom, and learning from an on-demand or asynchronous course.
The live classroom setup is the way you learned to learn from when you were a child: you and your classmates sitting at desks in neat rows facing a teacher and a whiteboard. It’s a time-honored way of learning that goes back at least a couple hundred years (when whiteboards were black), and it still has much to recommend it, especially when you don’t understand something and need to get the teacher to hit Pause before you get hopelessly muddled. All you have to do is raise your hand, and you’ll be enlightened. It’s familiar, effective, and a generally great way to learn. The only problem you’re going to encounter when it comes to learning something like web design in anything but the largest markets in the country is that finding a live in-person class where you live is going to be like looking for a needle in a needle-less haystack.
To the rescue comes the live online class. Here, you’re using the wonders of the World Wide Web to learn, hooking up your computer to a live teacher located somewhere on the planet, and a group of classmates that is also scattered to the four winds. The teacher instructs in real time and is similarly able to interact with the students in real time. Thus, should you have a question, all you need to do is click on the handy Raise Hand icon and the teacher will call on you, just as if you’d raised your physical hand in a live class. Unlike a live class, an online one lets you follow the proceedings from a comfortable chair at home or someplace else that’s quiet and has a lock on the door, dressed as comfortably as you usually dress when you’re at home, and without having had to go outside and lose precious time in traffic getting to a brick-and-mortar school. Although it may still seem unfamiliar to you, live online instruction is a best-of-both-worlds learning solution that has, over the 20-odd years it’s been in existence, proven itself extremely effective for grown-ups thirsting to drink from the Spring of Knowledge.
That leaves the on-demand class. In this setup, you watch a series of pre-recorded video tutorials that explain the subject matter. You’re free to watch them whenever you want and wherever there’s good Wi-Fi (try Undercurrent Coffee in Plaza Midwood if you haven’t already), which is incredibly convenient. But before you get too carried away by the idea of learning where and when you want to be a Web Designer, you have to realize that this type of course doesn’t allow for any direct real-time contact with the teacher. That’s fine as long as you understand the ideas with which you’re being regaled, but it’s not so fine when you don’t grasp something and want to ask a question. Sure, you can back up the video and watch it again, but you’re not going to find an answer that wasn’t there the first time you viewed it. There’s just nothing that can replace a live teacher.
You’ll find a surfeit of purported web design classes on YouTube, including one that promises to cover the subject in one minute. Others take rather more time to complete, although they generally run for a few hours, as opposed to a live online class, which should take you weeks rather than hours to do the job right. From this and the preceding discussion of asynchronous courses, you can infer that you can’t learn web design for free online. You’ll need a longer course, you’ll need a live teacher, and you’ll need course materials that are more current than a lot of what’s to be found on YouTube.
That doesn’t mean that the tutorials you’ll find on YouTube are totally worthless. They’re not a bad way for you to test the waters, find out what web design really entails, and whether it’s a field you actually want to pursue. This applies to the free classes that some of the better-known schools (including Noble Desktop) make available on their websites as well. They can be seen as something of an amuse-bouche that will get you ready for the kind of live online course you’re going to need if you're to break into the field.
Alongside pure web design—that is, the combination of design principles and the modest coding requirements that go with making those designs a reality—a good idea would be to learn what you can about UX and UI design. Before the Web Designer arrives on the scene, the UX and UI designers will have gone over the specifics of the website, sketching them out, sometimes literally, more often using wireframing software. User Experience (UX) design is the more abstract of the two fields: it calls upon the Designer to come up with what can be termed the feel of a website. Do you want the user to be informed? Amused? Done out of their last drachmai? Should there be more images than text or more text than images? And so on. After that comes the User Interface (UI) Designer, who is responsible for the elements with which the user will interact. It’s a job that involves a certain amount of coding ability, but does not cover the overall look of a website, which is the Web Designer’s purview. The more you know about UX and UI as a Web Designer, the more you’ll be able to do, and, thus, the more versatile and valuable you’ll be. Both UX and UI require some study beyond what you’ll learn in a web design course, but the work should be worth it.
There’s not an industry in Charlotte that doesn’t need a good Web Designer. Be it a Fortune 500 company or a stand-alone jewelry store, every company under the sun today needs a website. Admittedly, there are a few small businesses in Charlotte that don’t have websites; they should. They needn’t have ecommerce sites, but these businesses should still have a web presence that will make people feel as though they should visit the brick-and-mortar shop. A website is the best way to get the word out about a business, and that entails the services of a Web Designer.
Although it might come as a surprise to non-Charlotteans, Charlotte is the United States’ second-largest banking center after New York City. Bank of America is only the tip of an iceberg (admittedly a very large tip) that includes Ally Financial, USAA, and the East Coast headquarters of Wells Fargo. Financial institutions have elaborate websites that allow users to interact with their money in ways that have totally changed the banking industry. Although the means of getting a computer to dispense cash has yet to be invented, you can do just about anything else that’s financially legal using online banking. Websites, therefore, have become absolutely essential to the banking industry. These sites sit at the nexus of web design and FinTech, the new financial technologies that are transforming the way humans interact with their money. As a result, financial institutions' websites are some of the most complex and involved to be found, and large teams of designers and developers are involved in their creation, their subsequent development, and their maintenance.
Another major Charlotte industry is prepared foods, ranging from Dole (who knew pineapples grew in the Piedmont?) to Bojangles to Food Lion supermarkets to, last but certainly not least, Krispy Kreme. These organizations’ websites are different from the financial ones described above. They’re all informational and regale the user with recipes and lists of products and locations of stores, and, in Dole’s case, a tribute to 125 years of bananas. Design is essential to this type of website, since they have to be appetizing as well as functional, and this is where a Web Designer can play a major role in making or breaking a site. Depending on their complexity, food industry sites can be created in-house by teams working directly for the company, or they can be farmed out to web design firms that create websites for their clients, and, sometimes, even maintain them by providing content for blogs and making sure all the buttons are in good working order.
Although the city’s growing popularity has resulted in higher rents that have wrought some havoc with the health of the city’s small businesses, Charlotte still remains home to an impressive and often fascinating array of independent enterprises. There’s Quad Espresso Jewelry and The Golden Carrot, both specifically North Carolinian jewelers, Bean Vegan Cuisine (if you want more than carrots), and Night Swim Coffee Roastery and Cafe. All of these businesses have websites that are more than just informational placeholders on the World Wide Web: the two jewelry stores are ecommerce sites, the coffee place offers in its ecommerce guise gift items, a subscription program, and, yes, coffee beans, as well as online ordering, as does the plant-based food restaurant, which provides a tie-in with DoorDash. As a general rule, these sites are designed and constructed by web design firms or, in some cases, by freelancers who run businesses as small as those to which they cater.
Charlotte is home to an enormous number of nonprofit organizations. One count puts their number at nearly 16,000. Here, the need for a website is paramount, as, if you’re trying to raise money (and that’s the chronic state of a nonprofit), you’ve got to get the word out that you exist. You may also want to accept donations on your website, offer sign-ups for volunteers, show off a gallery of your good works, or maintain a blog. These sites are generally the province of specialist web design firms that work exclusively with nonprofits. Thus, if your goal is to be a Web Designer and yet give something back to the Charlotte community, one of these firms may be an ideal place to land professionally.
Web design is a wide-ranging field that incorporates a range of different job titles and career possibilities that stretch far beyond simple design. The Bureau of Labor Statistics lumps web designers together with digital interface designers, and, in 2023, tabulated 850 people working in that category in the Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia statistical area. They earned a mean wage of approximately $91,000, a very appealing number—lower than the national average, but, for the time being, Charlotte’s cost of living is 2% lower than the national average as well. There are other ways to break down the Web Designer category and to examine salaries more closely; a few examples follow.
Indeed tells a markedly less sanguine story about web designers and their wages in Charlotte: according to that site, their average salary comes out to roughly $52,000, with a bottom-of-the-range figure that dips as low as $23,000. The numbers in the upper half of the range are more encouraging, but you have to figure that entry-level salaries aren’t going to be found at that end of the spectrum.
When you change the job title variable to UI Designer, the numbers change considerably. Most notably, the mean salary figure jumps to nearly $80,000. UI designers have more training than web designers, and, while their job is not a coding position per se, they do have more knowledge of how to get a computer to do their bidding than a Designer with no coding ability. UI is, however, still largely a creative field, and you can extend the job’s responsibilities to the kind of work that usually falls under the heading of web design.
Although it’s a less technical profession than UI, the salary numbers for UX designers are significantly higher in Charlotte: the mean salary is nearly $123,000, with numbers that range as high as $190,000 contributing to the average. You can’t expect to make that much starting out, but there’s some very good news in that the lowest reported UX Designer salary on Indeed is nearly $80,000. UX is almost as much a creative calling as web design, although UX designers create something as ephemeral as an experience, rather than just picking out colors and fonts. Thus, stretching yourself into the world of UX design is probably an excellent move if you’re seeking to maximize your earning potential.
Although not as well-paying as the UX Designer role described above, user experience researchers occupy an interesting niche in the overall website creation process. As the title suggests, UX researchers conduct research into the overall habits of website users to provide the UX designers with the input they need to create an appealing user experience. Those who enjoy researching topics will feel right at home in this role. The mean annual salary for a User Experience Researcher in Charlotte is $52,000.
Central Piedmont Community College, which serves the Charlotte-Mecklenburg community with a wide variety of both degree and certificate programs, offers a solid number of web design classes, from Web Development Fundamentals to Web Markup and Scripting to Mobile Interface Design all the way through to Ecommerce Programming. Also on offer is a certificate program: Information Technology Certificate Specialization in Front-end Development Fundamentals. Although not a web design program per se, the certificate incorporates three of the above-referenced web classes and would prepare a student for more advanced studies in either web design or development. The school offers classes both live in-person at one of its eight campuses in the Charlotte area and online.
Your other options for a web design course will involve casting your net further afar by choosing the internet for delivery of your course. A ||CPN890|| program is available from Noble Desktop, a New York City-based school with 20 years of experience in teaching tech and design subjects (thus, web design is exactly in the school’s wheelhouse.) The program covers HTML, CSS, and front-end JavaScript, as well as Figma, UI design, and WordPress, along with a side trip to using HTML to automate emails. The program is available full-time (it takes about six weeks to complete in this format) or in the evenings part-time (about five months’ time will be necessary to complete the course that way.)
If you’re interested specifically in UX and UI design, Noble Desktop has a UX & UI Design Certificate program. It concentrates on design principles for both UX and UI, Figma, user testing, and prototyping. The curriculum concentrates on the design side of the processes and, therefore, includes no instruction in scripting. The program is available full-time (six weeks approximately) or part-time (24 weeks.)
Both these Noble Desktop certificate programs include 1-to-1 mentoring sessions to personalize your learning experience and offer valuable professional advice, both to help with coursework and to prepare you for the job search process. You’ll additionally get a free retake option good for one year, Noble’s proprietary workbooks and class materials, and access to recordings of the day’s classes should something not have settled quite completely in your brain during the day. A number of financing options is available as well.
Another established online school with web design offerings is General Assembly. The school offers an in-depth UX Design Bootcamp (a certificate program in all but name) that requires 12 weeks to complete full-time. The topics covered in the program include wireframing, prototyping, user research, usability testing, visual design, plus a dip into UI design. The course can be taken part-time as well as full-time, and a multitude of financing options is available.
Web design training isn’t only for people seeking to set out on a new career: you may have a ready-made team that’s remarkably competent but needs training in web design, either because of a new project they’ll be taking on or because of shifting responsibilities in the workplace. Noble Desktop can come to your assistance and help with the upskilling of your team in web design topics, either by arranging for training at your location in Greater Charlotte or by creating training that can be delivered across the internet to your employees wherever they may find themselves.
A further option is Noble Desktop’s voucher program, through which the members of your team can take one or more of Noble’s regularly scheduled web design classes. Substantial discounts are available for multiple purchases. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to Noble Desktop’s Corporate Sales division with any inquiries you may have.