Best Web Design Classes Portland, OR: Find Courses & Onsite Training

Learn More About Portland Web Design Courses

Web design is both the art and the craft of selecting the look of a website and combining its disparate parts into a cohesive whole. These parts consist of text and images, both static and dynamic (i.e., moving, as in a carousel banner or embedded video). Whereas web developers handle the actual construction of a website, the Designer is responsible for its aesthetic appearance. The role, therefore, calls for more visual sense than coding ability.

Web design dates back to the inception of the World Wide Web in 1989. Back then, when the pyramids were still being built, there wasn’t much to a webpage beyond a lot of academic words held in place by a simple markup language. That was HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), and it remains very much in use to this day. When the 1990s brought the internet to homes and businesses, websites kept pace with this unprecedented user interest and became more interactive thanks to the development of scripting languages, the most notable of which was JavaScript. From there, the way was paved for the development of ecommerce in the form of sites like the one named after a river in South America that started off by selling books. Appearances count for much, and the Web Designer became the person responsible for the look of these newfangled online stores and the other websites that were springing up like mushrooms.

More recently, the world of web design has undergone a major shift due to the popularization of the smartphone. As people now walk around with computers in their pockets, they can use them to access the World Wide Web from virtually anywhere. As a result, the majority of first views of websites take place on screens that vary considerably from the dimensions of even a small laptop computer. This has turned the design process on its head. Where once the desktop version of a site was created and then scaled down for mobile devices, today exactly the reverse happens. Things move quickly in the world of web design, and anyone interested in the field should be ready for the constant wave of innovations that keeps it in a state of constant change.

What Can You Do with Web Design Training?

It’s a bit circular for an answer, but studying web design will prepare you for a career as a Web Designer. The field makes a good fit for artistic and visually creative types who would prefer not to be starving artists by profession. Web designers get a lot of creative leeway, as a visually striking website is sure to get noticed. They are only limited by the technologically feasible, the arbiter of which is the Web Developer, to whom falls the responsibility of coding the Designer’s visual concept.

You can construct as well as design websites. Although that calls for coding ability, content management systems (CMSs) such as WordPress now allow people without [much] coding talent to create websites on their own, as the CMS functions as an intermediary between the user and code. Full-stack developer/designers are a valuable commodity and can often freelance successfully, especially for smaller organizations with smaller budgets. You can also offer free website advice to friends and family and practice hustling by getting a food cart you enjoy to have you build their website in exchange for free khao man gai for life.

What Will I Learn in a Web Design Class?

While not all web design classes teach exactly the same thing, there is a lot of material they all have to cover if they’re to prepare you for the expectations of hiring managers. You can’t hope to make a career as a Web Designer without knowledge of the trio of languages that hold the Web up: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. However, because design remains a creative field, you’ll also need to develop so-called soft design skills to go along with your harder (and more easily quantifiable) technical ones.

HTML and CSS

HTML was there for the dawn of the World Wide Web, and it remains the Web’s core technology. You can’t create a website without it, as it tells your browser how to display a given page. With only some 140 tags to its name, though, it doesn’t have a lot of bells, whistles, or design options. For more elaborate styling of text, you’ll have to turn to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which plays Pollux to HTML’s Castor. Neither HTML nor CSS is especially difficult to learn, especially when compared to complete computing languages such as Python or C#. You can get by as a Web Designer quite well without knowing the latter two, but the first two are probably the first things that your web design course will teach you.

JavaScript for Front-end Development

Just like Papua New Guinea, the World Wide Web has three official languages, only, in place of English, Hiri and Tok Pisin, the Web’s three languages are HTML, CSS and JavaScript. While HTML and CSS take care of the static elements on a webpage, JavaScript is responsible for a page’s dynamic and interactive aspects. It is a full-fledged (Turing complete) computer language, and turned out to be capable of doing a great deal more than Brendan Eich envisaged when he created it in 1995. Originally intended as a scripting language, JavaScript has gone on to be used for creating the server sides of websites as well as being one of the core languages of the Internet of Things (IoT): the same JavaScript that updates webpages before your very eyes is now also the language that makes your lights turn off when they think it’s time for you to go to bed. Fear not: as a Web Designer, you won’t be programming smart popcorn poppers, but you will need to know something of JavaScript’s original purpose. You can count on a web design course to teach it to you.

UX/UI Design and Figma

These are far more creative skills than the programming languages just discussed. User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design are another pair of inseparables encountered in the world of the World Wide Web. UX design involves coming up with the overall flavor of a website. UI is the more tangible of the twins and involves the creation of the parts of the site with which users will interact. The UX Designer says what buttons are necessary, the UI Designer decides where the buttons go, and the Web Designer gets to choose what color they’ll be. Pulling these different design spheres together is Figma, a web application that allows for collaboration among the designers involved in creating a site. A web design course won’t teach you everything you need to know to become a UX or UI Designer, but it will teach you about the processes involved and how you can fit the various pieces of a website’s design together.

Flexbox and Grid

Both Flexbox and Grid are CSS modules that facilitate the layout of individual webpages. They differ in how they operate: Flexbox lets the user create flexible boxes that start out in one dimension, while Grid puts virtual two-dimensional graph paper at the user’s disposal. They are by no means the only layout tools available, but they are comparatively easy to use. They can even be combined for work on more complicated projects. You’re nearly certain to learn to use both in any web design course.

WordPress and Other CMSs

A reasonably adept person should be able to create a website using only a CMS like WordPress. That, at least, is why CMSs were invented. They can be used to create some very impressive things, especially if the person using them knows HTML. Web designers can turn this to their advantage and employ a CMS to create a site they couldn’t create with their otherwise limited coding abilities. For this reason, your course is sure to teach you how to use WordPress at the very least, and to show you the ways in which it can be used profitably for a Designer seeking to offer clients a complete web design and development package.

Design Theory

In addition to the technical subjects just outlined, your course will also cover the fundamental artistic principles that underlie good website design. This exploration of design concepts and their execution is considered a soft skill, although, unlike some other soft skills (such as teamwork and problem-solving), this one isn’t so vague as to mean almost nothing. Of course, you can’t teach artistic inspiration, but a good web design class will allow you to hone your creative abilities into something upon which you can build a career.

How Hard is It to Learn Web Design?

Harder than eating a Reggie Deluxe without making a mess of your shirt. Easier than playing a pickup touch football game in Mill Ends Park.

As so much of web design involves artistic principles rather than hard-and-fast tech knowledge, it is one of the easier IT subjects to learn. Yes, you’ll need to know HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript, but those are a lot easier than most programming languages (easier than Python, loads easier than C#, on a different planet from the esoteric lunacy of Whitespace) and even creative, right-brained types can pick them up. In many ways, the more challenging part of learning web design is the actual design part, the core of which cannot be taught, and the rest of which calls for not only creative inspiration but also the ability to express that inspiration within the tiny world of a mobile phone screen. If you’re coming at web design from an art school background, you’ll discover pretty quickly that learning how to paint and learning how to make a website look good on an iPhone are two very different skills.

You should also not forget that there’s a big difference between learning enough about a skill to land an entry-level job and actually mastering it. In the case of web design, as with so many other things, mastery only comes with time, perhaps even with the 10,000 hours of solid practice Malcolm Gladwell advocates (10,000 hours makes for 250 40-hour work weeks, or about five years on the job). With time, you’ll grow and get better at both the artistic and technical sides of your job. Experience is a precious commodity, and it will play a major role in your development as a Web Designer.

What Are the Most Challenging Parts of Learning Web Design?

Because web design education is two-pronged, the most challenging part of learning it is going to depend on you and how your brain is configured. The left-brain student of web design is going to have a much easier time picking up HTML and the other languages required to do the job than grasping the slipperier artistic challenges that come with the role. And vice versa: creative people learning web design may fall victim to technophobia and struggle with the programming concepts while having an easy time when it comes to imagining something artistic to solve a website problem. Just be aware that neither stumbling block is an insurmountable uphill battle.

How Long Does It Take to Learn Web Design?

You can earn a web design certificate far more quickly than you can get a Ph. D. in astrophysics. HTML, CSS, and basic front-end JavaScript aren’t sending a rocket to Saturn, and you can get a firm grasp on them in about two months’ time if you put some mental elbow grease into your studies. If you don’t have the freedom to take a full-time class, most schools have part-time options as well. These obviously take longer; about six months is going to be necessary to get through the course and be eligible for an entry-level job. You’ll need longer to achieve any degree of serious mastery over the subject, but first things first.

Should I Learn Web Design in Person or Online?

If you want to learn something these days—from how to perform Japanese tea ceremony to how to brew your own craft beer—you have four options for how to go about it. You can buy the book and be an autodidact, or you can bring a teacher into the equation in one of three ways: live in-person, live online, and asynchronous online.

The first of these, the live in-person class, is what you probably think of when you hear the word school. With good reason: you started learning in the same room as your teacher back in kindergarten, and this method of face-to-face instruction probably dates all the way back to the Egyptian Old Kingdom. There’s a lot to be said in favor of this type of learning, not the least of which is that it gives you the ability to raise a hand and ask a question when you don’t understand something. Being able to attend such a class would be ideal for many people; the only problem is that web design classes that meet in-person have become rarer than the filet mignon tartare at El Gaucho.

The disappearance of in-person classes is directly attributable to the success of online learning. The live online class has been encroaching on the live in-person class’ territory for twenty years now, and has proven itself a highly efficient modality for adult education. Although you follow the class on your computer, instruction is still 100% live; you can ask questions in real-time to your heart’s content. Yes, there’s something of a learning curve when it comes to juggling cameras and microphones and chats and the Raise Hand button, but it’s quickly surmounted. In addition, you lose no time commuting to school, and you get to study in a familiar space that literally offers you all the comforts of home. Encompassing as it does the advantages of a live class and the ease of remote learning, a live online class gives you the best of both worlds.

That leaves the on-demand or self-paced online class. In this setup, you’re a passive participant in a series of video tutorials that feature a talking head that teaches you, but with which you can’t interact. Most critically, you can’t ask questions when you get lost. There are advantages, however, the greatest of which is that asynchronous learning like this allows you to study wherever and whenever you want. Thus, you can pack up your laptop and head over to Spin Laundry Lounge on North Fremont Street, and do eco-friendly washing while learning to design websites via free wifi. Attractive though all that freedom may be, you will very likely miss the real-time contact with your instructor. Thus, if you can fit a live class into your schedule, and your wallet can accommodate it, you should try and do so.

Can I Learn Web Design Free Online?

YouTube sports a video that says it can teach you web design in one minute. It has many others of longer duration, too, and they all come with the hard-to-argue-with price tag of free. These tutorials are essentially on-demand classes with all the shortcomings of the breed. They may even have more shortcomings than that, as many of them have been becoming obsolete and watching the march of technological progress go by while sitting on Google’s servers in rural Finland. If you’re serious about learning web design, you’re going to need a teacher with whom you can interact, you’re going to need weeks of training rather than the scant few hours that the YouTube courses provide, and, alas, you’re going to have to pay for the privilege. The eternal truth applies: there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Eternal truths notwithstanding, the free tutorials on YouTube and elsewhere aren’t entirely without their uses. They may not teach you everything you need to know about web design, but they will give you a glimpse of what the field is like and whether it’s something that will retain your interest. To this same end, some IT schools (Noble Desktop among them) make their introductory classes available on their websites. By way of a bonus, you can use these free resources to pick up the rudiments of HTML and not run the risk of being overwhelmed by your first exposure to coding when you start your real-time course.

What Should I Learn Alongside Web Design?

The standard elements of a web design education can very profitably be supplemented by learning as much as possible about User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design. These last two fields are located upstream from web design: the UX and UI designers do their jobs and create a wireframe of the website before the Web Designer steps in with a box of metaphoric colored pencils to color in the digital sketch.

UX is harder to explain than UI, as it’s concerned, not with hard and fast technological processes, but, rather, with the extensive research and planning that are required to give a website its overall ambiance. Is the goal of the website to convey information? To provide entertainment? Or to get users to spend their last few kopeks on gold-framed mirrors? Following the work of the UX Designer, the UI Designer enters the picture and formulates the part of the website with which the user will interact. Knowledge of UX and UI design will add considerably to your capabilities in website creation—and, more importantly, to your earning potential.

Industries That Use Web Design

No industry in PDX, or anywhere for that matter, can afford to operate in today’s business climate without the services of at least one good Web Designer. Whether the company is a tech giant like Intel, a small retailer like Mantel with its carefully curated artists’ pieces, or a service business like Spin Laundry Lounge, a business needs a website. True, there are Portland businesses without websites, but even stand-alone food trucks need to get the word out that they exist, even if they don’t want to set up an ecommerce site that can handle online ordering. If you want to get the word out that you’re in business in Portland, you need a website. And a website needs a Designer.

Tech

Nicknamed Silicon Forest in some quarters, Greater Portland is home to some 1200 tech companies, from manufacturing giant Intel (the area’s largest non-healthcare employer) down to tiny startups nurtured by the city’s seed funding programs and in its business incubators. These businesses have websites of varying sizes that exist primarily to inform. They encompass text, photos, videos, and graphics of varying degrees of splashiness, and come in varying degrees of ambitiousness. Many of these websites are created in-house (if a tech company doesn’t know how to build a website, that casts some doubt on whether it can perform in the tech market), while others are farmed out to agencies that may know more about what makes a good website.

Athletic Footwear

While Portland doesn’t have any sneaker factories, some very important athletic wear manufacturers have their corporate headquarters located in PDX. Nike (the city’s only Fortune 500 corporation), Adidas and Keen lead the list here. They all have high-traffic websites, partly designed to inform the public about their product (this is Portland, after all, so there’s usually something on the site about the shoes’ environmental friendliness), but mostly designed as online shops that can offer a wider selection of shoes and sizes than can be found in the stockrooms of a brick-and-mortar store. Giant ecommerce websites are very different from the ones that seek only to inform about a product, and have to be, first and foremost, well-oiled machines that won’t keep customers waiting while overcomplicated pages load, and that will make the product look so good that people will want to buy them without even trying them on. An ecommerce site requires constant oversight as a malfunction can cost the company one, several, or many sales. It also needs to be kept current with the latest product information, and, generally, some sort of a blog that infuses the site with a steady stream of fresh content. Advertising agencies play a major role in the design and development of major ecommerce sites like these, which are then usually maintained by an in-house team that can literally reap the profits from the site. An interesting new aspect of ecommerce sites is the use of AI to answer customers’ questions. That constitutes a new design element that needs to be integrated into the overall site without being overly intrusive.

Small Businesses

One of the good things the internet has wrought is that it has given small, local businesses the opportunity to reach people far, far beyond the scope of a brick-and-mortar shop. While Spin Laundry Lounge’s website is strictly informative (you can’t send your clothes to be fluffed and folded through the internet, although you probably wish you could), Mantel’s website does a great deal more than tell you it exists and give driving and parking directions. As a result, if you don’t live in Portland, you can still order shrimp cocktail stud earrings or a seashell filled with lip balm and have it delivered straight to you, be it in Key West or Utqiagvik. Ecommerce sites like this also serve as catalogs of available merchandise that preview what a Portlander will find in the shop. Small business sites of both types (the informative and the online store) are generally the work of design agencies or freelancers who can use GoDaddy’s Online Store or Shopify. Additionally, the owners of these businesses, if they have the time and inclination, can save money by doing the CMS work themselves.

Not-for-Profit Sector

Portland wouldn’t be Portland if it didn’t have a large, socially conscious nonprofit sector. As it turns out, there are over 15,000 such organizations in the metro area, all of which are in need of a good website that will publicize their existence, keep donors up-to-date on activities, and invite new supporters to make donations. You want a site like this to look slick but not too slick, since you don’t want people thinking that their donations are going toward website improvements rather than the good works your agency does. For these and other reasons, nonprofits’ websites are very often the work of specialist agencies that know the ins and outs of not-for-profit organization web design. If you’re contemplating a career in web design that won't be completely mercenary and involve selling overpriced made-in-Vietnam sneakers to people who already have a couple dozen pair of them in their closets, one of these design firms might be an excellent professional fit.

Web Design Job Titles and Salaries

Web design as a field encompasses several different careers, some of which spill over from the duties of a Web Designer into other domains. The Bureau of Labor Statistics lumps Web Designers with Digital Interface Designers into a single category; in 2023, the the BLS tabulated 1180 people working in the field in the Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro statistical area. Their mean salary is nearly $110,000 per annum, although the median figure falls considerably short of that. Thus, more than half of the Web Designers in the area make substantially less than that $110,000 figure. There are other ways to break down Web Designers’ job titles and salaries than the BLS’s somewhat misleading arrangement; a few of these follow.

Web Designer

Indeed’s figures tell a different story when it comes to Web Designer salaries: for Portland, the mean figure its salary finder lists is just north of $58,000, considerably less than the numbers published by the BLS. The lower end of the salary range given by Indeed is only $33,000, indicating that Web Designers might not be the highest-paid people in metropolitan Portland.

User Interface Designer

When you change out the job title field on Indeed’s salary finder from Web Designer to UI Designer, the numbers undergo a startling shift. The average salary jumps to more than $90,000, while, even more encouragingly, the lowest reported salary is approximately $76,000. (You should be warned that the sample size is extremely small, meaning that there may well be lower-paid UI designers in the area whose salaries weren’t reported.) UI Designers make more than Web Designers largely because they’re more highly skilled, especially in the technical knowledge department. You can’t be a UI Designer without some grasp of what makes a website’s front-end tick. As often happens in the workplace, the larger skill set translates into larger salaries.

User Experience Designer

UX Designers require less technical knowledge than their UI equivalents, but the field comes with its own layered skill set. UX designers’ salaries regularly come in ahead of those of UI designers, although the mean doesn’t vary as much in Portland as it does in some other locations. The average salary in the region for UX Designers comes in at a bit more than $93,000. The range between the lowest and highest reported salaries is also wider than that on the UI side, with the lower (presumably entry-level) end of the range coming in at about $56,000 per annum. UX Design is an abstract and creative field that requires skills like the ability to interpret the extensive research that goes into the creation of a user experience. It is unquestionably a more remunerative field than web design; you might do well to consider it if you want to make making websites into a career.

User Experience Researcher

A UX Researcher performs and collects the background information that UX Designers use to come up with their ideas on what a user experience should be. The research is conducted largely online and covers the ways in which people use websites and what they expect from the internet. For people who enjoy researching things, the field is definitely a good fit professionally, and it pays better than web design. It’s a bit of a stretch getting from a design background to a research role, but you might want to consider the transition simply on pecuniary grounds. Although the sample size upon which Indeed draws its figures is statistically negligible, the lower of the two figures that the site quotes is ever so slightly more than $83,000 per annum. Inferring that this is a starting salary is probably statistically unwarranted.

Web Design Classes Near Me

Portland Community College, in addition to an on-campus two-year Associate’s Degree program in web design, has teamed up with edtech company Ed2Go to create an extensive self-paced certificate program designed to prepare graduates for an easy transition to the workforce upon completion of their studies. A full 390 hours of watching videos is required to finish the program; students must do so in the space of a year. The curriculum casts a very wide net, and begins with a pair of modules on Adobe Photoshop and Animate. The rest of the syllabus covers all the expected topics, as well as a deeper self-paced dive into JavaScript than most live courses include.

There is no web design class that meets live in Greater Portland, which is par for the course in all but the largest markets. The chief reason for the dearth of in-person classes is that so much of adult education has migrated to online delivery; web design is no exception to this pattern.

Noble Desktop makes its classes available in-person in New York as well as anywhere that the internet can reach. As both a design and an IT school, Noble Desktop is well-positioned to offer a well-rounded web design education in the form of its Web Design Certificate program that incorporates training in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, as well as some UI concepts, instruction in how to use WordPress, and a slight but not unrelated detour to how to use HTML for automating emails. The program requires approximately six weeks to complete if taken full-time. There’s a part-time version available as well; you’ll need closer to six months to complete your studies that way.

If you’re more interested in UX and UI design, Noble Desktop offers a UX & UI Certificate program that prepares you for both fields, with modules in design theory, user testing, prototyping, Figma, and scripting, although the course doesn’t delve too deeply into technical matters. The time frames are similar to those for the Web Design Certificate program described above.

Noble’s certificate programs include multiple 1-to-1 mentoring sessions with an experienced Designer who can offer you advice, both on matters covered in the classroom and as it relates to your job search process, including polishing your resume and putting you through mock interviews. Either of the two programs described above will provide you with a free retake option that is absolutely free and good for one year. You’ll also receive workbooks and other classroom materials that you may keep for your future reference, and get access to recordings of your classroom sessions to enable you to go over material that, especially in the full-time version of the class, comes at you quickly and furiously. You may select from several financing possibilities, if you so desire.

Another online school that features certificate programs in key IT subjects is General Assembly. Although it has no web design program per se, it features a UX Design Bootcamp that requires 12 weeks to complete. The syllabus features user research, usability testing, wireframing, prototyping, and both visual and UI design. The program can also be taken part-time, and a wide selection of financing options is available.

Web Design Corporate Training

You don’t have to be in search of a new career to benefit from training in web design. The skills involved are valuable in just about any industry, and you may well have a team in need of some degree of training in the subject, be it a full-time in-depth course or just a quick brush-up for existing skills. As long as your company isn’t headquartered in North Korea, Eritrea or Turkmenistan, Noble Desktop can provide your employees with precisely the training they require. The curriculum can be tailored completely to your specifications. The resulting training can be provided onsite in Portland, or delivered using a teleconferencing platform of your choice.

Alternatively, Noble Desktop offers a voucher program through which your team members may take any of Noble’s regularly scheduled classes. Interesting discounts are available for multiple purchases. Feel free to contact Noble Desktop’s Corporate Sales Department for additional information on corporate training offerings.

Top Certificate Programs

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Top Certificate Programs

Top Certificate Programs

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Top Certificate Programs

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Web Design Certificate Learn The Skills Guarantee™

Noble Desktop UI Design Certificate

Noble Desktop UX & UI Design Certificate

Noble Desktop Front-End Web Development Certificate

Noble Desktop Figma Masterclass

Key Insights

Learn More About Portland Web Design Courses

What Can You Do with Web Design Training?

What Will I Learn in a Web Design Class?

HTML and CSS

JavaScript for Front-end Development

UX/UI Design and Figma

Flexbox and Grid

WordPress and Other CMSs

Design Theory

How Hard is It to Learn Web Design?

What Are the Most Challenging Parts of Learning Web Design?

How Long Does It Take to Learn Web Design?

Should I Learn Web Design in Person or Online?

Can I Learn Web Design Free Online?

What Should I Learn Alongside Web Design?

Industries That Use Web Design

Tech

Athletic Footwear

Small Businesses

Not-for-Profit Sector

Web Design Job Titles and Salaries

Web Designer

User Interface Designer

User Experience Designer

User Experience Researcher

Web Design Classes Near Me

Web Design Corporate Training

Portland Web Design Corporate & Onsite Training Noble Desktop

Portland Web Design
Corporate & Onsite Training