Web Design Classes San Antonio, TX

Web design is the art (and craft) of determining the look of a website and arranging its various components into a visually pleasing whole. Those components are both static (text, images) and dynamic (animated GIFs, embedded videos, carousel banners), and the Designer is the person entrusted with their harmonious arrangement. Web Designers are essentially the aesthetic flip-side of web developers, who are responsible for coding and related construction duties.

One can’t speak of web design prior to the 1989 debut of the World Wide Web. In that distant era, all but lost in the mists of time, webpages were static. The original point of the Web was to transfer written information within academe, and, thus, there was no real need for anything beyond text and a simple markup language that could get material onto the screen. That markup language, HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) remains in use to this day and continues to be one of the pillars of the internet. When the greater public discovered the Web in the early 1990s, websites evolved into more dynamic entities that allowed for a great deal more user interaction, thanks to the advent of scripting languages. As websites increased in importance (especially to revolutionary businesses whose stores were nothing more than websites), so did the responsibilities of the Web Designer, who had to cater to the aesthetic expectations of the internet’s citizenry to fill their computer screens with text and images that were both functional and attractive.

Recent years have seen a new wrinkle in the web design Zeitgeist: with the popularization of the smartphone, average people now carry mini-computers in their pockets, and these can be used to interact with the World Wide Web from anywhere, with no need for a corded connection to the internet. The result is a new set of constraints placed upon web designers, who now operate according to the principle of “mobile first”: although a website is expected to have functionality across all platforms, most people look at websites for the first time on their phones, and, thus, websites are created for those tiny screens and made larger for desktop versions, as opposed to vice versa. This makes sense, given that Q3 2024 figures place the percentage of internet traffic on mobile devices at 58%. There is no doubt that another revolution is right around the corner as the tech landscape continues its unrelenting forward march. One thing is certain, however: web designers will have to be at the forefront of those responding to these changes.

What Can You Do with Web Design Training?

A study of web design topics and techniques will prepare you primarily for a career as a Web Designer. Such a career is a good outlet for people with artistic talent who are looking for a job that will let them be creative in a forest of non-creative, generally technical jobs. The creative potential that web designers can exercise is considerable: you begin designing a site with a blue-sky stance in which everything is assumed to be possible until proven otherwise. The Web Developer is the person whose job involves bringing you back to codable reality and bringing you back to the ground.

There is nothing to say that you can’t be a Web Developer as well as a Web Designer. That would mean having coding skills, although, with the profusion of CMSs (content management systems) such as Squarespace, Shopify, or WordPress, there’s no longer a need to code a website from scratch. Two-for-the-price-of-one designers/developers are in demand, as they can construct entire websites single-handedly, an arrangement that is financially most appealing, in particular to smaller organizations with budgets to match.

Being this kind of BOGO Designer opens the door to freelancing, since you’ll be a one-person website factory. You can take on individual clients as part of a side hustle, help out family and friends with their websites, and, while you’re hustling, talk your local dry cleaners into letting you do up their website in exchange for six months’ free fluff-and-fold.

What Will I Learn in a Web Design Class?

The syllabi of web design classes will, obviously, vary from school to school, but there are subjects that are common to just about every web design class under the sun. These are the basic tools of the trade such as HTML and its partner language, CSS, without which you can’t hope to make any inroads into the world of web design. Those technical skills are in addition to the more ephemeral artistic design skills you’re going to need for any design career.

HTML and CSS

In the beginning, there was HTML, and you can’t build a website without it. Hypertext Markup Language is the thing that instructs your browser how to display a webpage, and is the first step in making a web design into a reality. Working hand-in-hand with HTML is nearly always paired with CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, a language that gives your browser further information such as which colors and fonts to use. Neither HTML nor CSS is a full-fledged computer language, partly because of their extreme simplicity when compared to popular languages such as Python or Java. All told, there are only 140 or so HTML tags, and CSS isn’t too much more complicated. You may wonder why the first thing you’ll need to learn to be a Designer is a pair of simple computer languages, but the reality is that, without HTML and CSS, you’ll never be able to understand what’s possible when it comes to making a web design into a virtual reality.

Front-end JavaScript

Like Luxemburg, the Web has three official languages. In addition to HTML and CSS, your browser almost certainly employs JavaScript, the scripting language that makes websites dynamic and interactive. JavaScript is a complete computer language (meaning that it can do anything a computer can be expected to do), as it has shown by the ways it is currently employed, ways which creator Brendan Eich couldn’t have imagined when he cooked up the language in a few days in 1995. JavaScript is used today to build full-stack web applications and to program the devices that constitute the Internet of Things (IoT), which includes everything from kitchen appliances to doorbells. As a student of web design, however, your class will concentrate on the originally intended use of JavaScript: making the front ends of websites interactive and dynamic. Along the way, you’ll learn the rudiments of a highly useful computer language that may just start you off on a journey to learning to code in earnest.

Figma and UI/UX Design

These are skills that are sure to appeal more to your artistic right brain than learning to code. Figma is an application that allows groups of people to create, review and otherwise collaborate on user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design. It includes such features as prototyping tools and a vector graphics editor, and, while not a design tool per se, it creates a web-based setting in which designers can work.

Like HTML and CSS, UX and UI are inseparable, yet distinct twins that play a role in the birth of every site to be encountered on the World Wide Web. UX is the more difficult to define succinctly: it’s the early design phase during which the feel of a site is determined. Quite a bit of research goes into major sites’ UX design, the goal of which is, after all, to hook, reel, and land customers. UI design is somewhat more practical, as it corresponds to the creation of the part of the website with which the user interacts. If you want to use an ice cream metaphor, UX corresponds to the flavor of the website, while UI corresponds to how you want to have your ice cream, in a cone, in a dish, or in a five-tiered wedding cake to serve 300. Although UX and UI design are distinct professions, your design class will teach you something about both.

Flexbox and Grid

These are CSS modules that are employed for laying out individual webpages. The difference is their approach to the task: Flexbox creates flexible boxes, one dimension at a time, while Grid creates, well, a grid on which to arrange the parts of your page. Although there are other layout tools, these two are very popular with designers today and are relatively intuitive. They can even be used in tandem to create more complex pages. Pretty much any web design class will teach you to use both.

WordPress and Other CMSs

A content management system (CMS) is software that lets lay people with no coding background create websites on their own. WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix allow users to do some very impressive things with only a little HTML to their names. Shopify can even help you set up an e-commerce site without help from a developer. The usefulness of these systems to the Web Designer should be obvious, as they’re rarely coding experts, but, with some training, they can turn CMSs to their advantage to make their design visions a reality. Your course is definitely going to include a few lessons in how to use (at the very least) WordPress, and how to make it work for you professionally.

Design Technique

Alongside so much technology, a course in web design will also teach you the fundamental design principles for website creation. This is a far softer skill than the ones outlined above, but it is no less essential to good web design than knowing how to ask the waiter for the check in high-middle HTML. Your course may cover fundamental overall design principles, or start out a little further along with the application of those principles to web design. Some aspects of design can’t be taught, and you have to have some degree of aesthetic sensibility before you start, but a good class can help you channel your innate creative abilities into something that you can use to start a career that, unlike Starving Artist, comes with a steady paycheck.

How Hard is It to Learn Web Design?

Harder than taking the elevator to the top of the Tower of the Americas. Easier than getting to the top by using a grappling hook and suction cups.

In the scheme of tech education, web design is closer to the easier end of the spectrum than a lot of other popular subjects. The actual technology requirements for the job are HTML, CSS, and a smattering of JavaScript. You don’t need to know how to code in a difficult language like C# and what coding you do need to learn is well within the limitations of a creative right-brain sort of cerebrum. What you may find more challenging is the artistic aspect of the field. You can’t teach artistic ability, and, thus, you and the right hemisphere of your brain will be on your own to grasp fully what the creative part of web design entails.

Don’t forget that there’s a huge difference between learning a topic sufficiently to assume an entry-level position in the field and really mastering it. You’ll learn the former in your web design course; the latter will come only with hard work and experience. Your artistic senses will develop with experience as well, as you come to understand what works and what doesn’t. Thus, you shouldn’t expect to be done learning when you receive your certificate at the end of your web design course.

What Are the Most Challenging Parts of Learning Web Design?

That’s going to depend on the way your brain works. If you’re a left-brain person, you’re going to have an easy time picking up the tech subjects that are essential to the field; the more challenging side of the equation for you may well be the aesthetic aspects of the course. If, on the other hand, you’re a right-brain person, you may have technophobia and find HTML, CSS and JavaScript stumbling blocks that you’ll have to overcome. Whichever hemisphere of your brain has to do the heavier lifting, just remember that the work is a lot easier than programming in Malbolge, an esoteric computer language justifiably named after Dante’s Eighth Circle of Hell and in which

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Is the required input to get “Hello, World!” as an output.

How Long Does It Take to Learn Web Design?

The amount of time necessary to learn the basic and intermediate concepts that are essential for web design careers (that is to say HTML, CSS, basic JavaScript, design fundamentals, and something of UX and UI design) isn’t all that great. You can do it, if you work at it full-time, in under two months. That involves an immersive and intensive course that’s going to leave you tired by the time you’ve finished it. If that sounds like a little much, you can also choose to study part-time, in which case you’ll need about six months to complete most web design courses. Of course, you can’t expect to be an expert in a few months, but you will learn enough to qualify for an entry-level job and start a new career.

Should I Learn Web Design in Person or Online?

To learn anything in today’s world—be it how to make puffy tacos or how to rebuild the transmission on your truck—you’ll have to choose between four teaching modalities. The first is buying the book and teaching yourself. The other three involve a teacher, and break down into the following categories: live in-person, live online, and an online self-paced course.

A live in-person class is what you’re probably most used to: it puts you and your teacher in the same room, and should remind you of your education as it began in kindergarten (although a class for adults won’t require you to sit on the floor in a circle.) It’s probably the way the Ancient Egyptians taught when they invented school, and it still has a lot going for it. Its most salient feature is your ability to raise your hand to get the teacher’s attention and ask a question before you get hopelessly lost in something you don’t understand. The drawbacks aren’t all that great, but the inconvenient reality is that this type of in-person course is increasingly hard to find as adult education continues its online migration.

The live online class is a very worthy alternative to live in-person learning, as it encompasses the chief advantage of a live in-person class: the ability to ask the teacher a question when you don’t understand something. You don’t even have to exhaust yourself by raising your actual hand: you simply click on a Raise Hand button to alert the instructor who you have something to say. It’s just like being there in-person, only you get to do it from home, sitting in a comfortable chair complete with an ergonomic cushion and, in the chilly months, clad in a wearable blanket or something else that’s equally as comfy. Learning online may still seem strange to you, but, when looked at from the proper angle, it gives you a best-of-both-worlds solution to adult learning.

The third option is the on-demand class, also known as self-paced or asynchronous learning. (The synchronous alternative is the live classes just described.) These are really just a curated series of video tutorials that talk to you, but to which you can’t talk back. On the plus side, you can watch the tutorials whenever and wherever you want, assuming there’s a stable wifi connection on hand. Thus, you can take your computer to Estate Coffee Company (where they roast coffee as well as brew it), Shotgun Coffee Roasters (ditto), or Lady Bird Johnson Park (no coffee beans, but you can park your dog in the dog park and then set about learning for your next career pivot.) Before you get too excited about the freedom this setup offers, you should factor in the attendant impossibility of asking a question when you don’t get something. Yes, you can rewind the video and watch it a few more times, and maybe you’ll solve your problem on your own, but, if you really need help, the talking head on your computer screen isn’t going to come to your rescue. The simple reality is that nothing can replace a real-time teacher.

Can I Learn Web Design Free Online?

There’s a video on YouTube that claims to teach web design in the space of a minute. There’s a host of others of longer duration (and more serious purpose), and, like the one-minute class, come with a very attractive price tag of free. These tutorials are essentially asynchronous classes, and have all the defects that come with the breed (see above.) They actually have more defects than that: some of these free courses have been sitting on Google servers in some remote location in Finland or Chile for years, collecting dust as they became obsolete in the fast-developing world of tech. If you seriously want to learn web design, you’re going to need a live teacher who’s up-to-date with the progress being made in the field, you need weeks of schooling rather than just the few hours so-called complete YouTube classes offer, and, unfortunately for your wallet, money is going to have to change hands. The eternal truth obtains: if you pay bananas, you get monkeys.

The Musa paradisiaca Linn notwithstanding, these free tutorials do have their uses. They’re a good way for you to dip your toe into the ocean of web design to ascertain whether the field holds anything for you before you commit to a paid full-length class. The free classes offered by some tech schools (including Noble Desktop) on their websites are similarly useful, as, while you may like the idea of web design as a career, you may not be aware of everything that a course in the subject entails. As a bonus, you might be able to pick up HTML from these free resources and be a step ahead of the class when you begin your live course.

What Should I Learn Alongside Web Design?

In addition to the classic components of web design that you’ll learn in a web design class, you’d do well to learn what you can about UX and UI design as well. They’re two different fields situated upstream from web design, as the UX and UI designers do their thing before the Web Designer arrives on the scene, providing a rough sketch (or wireframe) of the site, the actual design particulars of which are the province of the actual website Designer.

Of the two fields, user experience is the harder to define, as it calls for something as abstract as the feel of a website. Is the goal of the site to inform? To amuse? To fleece users of their last Euro? Should it have more images than text, or vice versa? After the UX Designer answers those very general questions, the UI Designer arrives upon the scene, and thinks up the parts of the website with which the client will interact. If you know something about UX and UI, you’ll be a step closer to being able to design and construct an entire website on your own. That would make you into a useful commodity indeed, help you become a freelancer, and, not least of all, increase your earning potential considerably.

Industries That Use Web Design

There’s not an industry in Alamo City that doesn’t need the services of a good Web Designer. Whether it’s a Fortune 500 company like Valero or USAA, or a smaller retail entity such as Ruby Road Gems or the Carmel Soap Company, a business today needs a website. True, some small businesses in San Antonio lack websites, but they should have one. They needn’t have an e-commerce site if they don’t want to start shipping their wares around the world, but they should still have a presence on the web to encourage people to visit their brick-and-mortar shops. To get the word out about a business in this post-Yellow Pages era, you need a website, and even the simplest of websites needs a Designer.

Energy

San Antonio is home to a Fortune 500 energy company, Valero Energy, although it’s by no means the only oil and gas show in town. Energy plays a central role in the city’s economy, and websites are important to get the word out about, not only the existence of corporate behemoths (the Valero site includes a gas station finder), but also, in today’s world, of their companies’ redeeming features such as renewable diesel fuels in the face of increasing public ill-will towards energy giants. The websites of these companies are generally of the informative variety (you can’t sell gasoline across the internet the way you can lip balm), and are usually quite polished, incorporating photographic images, videos, text, and the occasional splashy graphic to make their points. Big companies often have their own web designers and developers on staff, or, particularly if the website isn’t in need of constant updating, may farm the work out to a web design agency, which may or may not be more cost-efficient than keeping your web design team on staff.

Tourism

Remembering the Alamo isn’t the only reason to visit San Antonio, although the Alamo does remain the city’s leading tourist attraction. The Convention Center hosts over 300 events a year that bring 750,000 visitors to the city, and that’s not counting pleasure tourists. The tourism industry’s web presence includes a sprawling master Visit San Antonio site, which includes such fancy features as a clickable map of the city’s neighborhoods. The Alamo’s own website is also a big glossy affair complete with a gift shop, as would befit Texas’ greatest historical tourist attraction. At the other end of the spectrum, most stand-alone restaurants have fairly elaborate websites, all the better to draw guests through their doors. These polished websites are all designed to make the city look attractive and a place worth spending at least part of a vacation. Looks are everything in this field, which makes the role of the Designer especially important. These sites are, more often than not, the work of design and development teams at agencies that specialize in this type of product, and are capable of keeping them up-to-date by the regular infusion of press releases and the occasional blog, as warranted by a combination of SEO (search engine optimization) principles and how much time and money the business owners want to invest in their websites.

Small Businesses

The wonders of the internet include the fact that a small, local business no longer need be limited by its brick-and-mortar scope. The aforementioned Ruby Road Gems and Carmel Soap Company have websites that go beyond information such as how to get to the shop. They have e-commerce stores tied to their sites. Thus, if you don’t live in San Antonio, you can still order a sunstone beaded necklace (your sacral chakra will thank you) or a jar of magnesium butter with lavender and have it delivered to your home. This type of e-commerce site doubles as a catalog of available products so you’ll know what awaits you in the store. These small business sites are either farmed out to specialized design agencies or are the work of independent freelancers. Of course, if the shop owners are intrepid and have extra time on their hands (not a likely occurrence if you’re running a small business), they can build their own sites using Shopify or GoDaddy’s Online Store.

Not-for-Profit Sector

San Antonio is home to a healthy assortment of not-for-profit organizations; one estimate places their number at over 11,000, with revenue of over $13 billion per annum. Where does that money come from, you may ask? Wherever the organizations can find it, which includes grassroots-type donations made through websites. A website is essential if you’re going to raise money, both to advertise your existence and to collect donations through a contribution portal. A nonprofit’s website can also include information on how to volunteer, provide pictures of the kinds of good works you’ve done, and, to keep the website competitive in the SEO sweepstakes, a blog. This type of site is very often the product of a design firm that specializes in not-for-profit organizations. If you hope to become a Web Designer and simultaneously give back to the San Antonio community, such a firm could be a very good professional fit.

Web Design Job Titles and Salaries

There are a lot of different professional aspects to the overall web design field, some of which extend beyond the usual parameters for pure web design. In its annual figures, the Bureau of Labor Statistics combines Web Designers with other Digital Interface Designers, and, in 2023, counted 410 people working in these capacities in the San Antonio-New Braunfels statistical area. That’s admittedly not a very large number (indeed, people in this line of work in San Antonio are employed at a rate that is just about half the national average), but they do make a thoroughly respectable average salary of $97,000 per annum. Beware, though, that the median figure falls out considerably below that, meaning that more than half the salaries paid to web designers fall out below the mean. There are other ways to break up the category of Web Designer and Web Designer-adjacent positions, including the following.

Web Designer

The story told by Indeed’s salary finder figures for Web Designers is decidedly less encouraging than that told by the BLS’s conflated category combinations. For San Antonio, Indeed posts a mean (average) salary of approximately $36,000. The lowest figure contributing to that mean (which, in this case, must apply to people working part-time in the field) is an alarmingly low $16,000 per annum. The top-of-the-range figures are a great deal more encouraging, but you can’t expect to be San Antonio’s highest-paid Web Designer right out of the gate.

User Interface Designer

Changing the job title you’re investigating to UI Designer from Web Designer causes the Indeed numbers to change substantially. The average becomes approximately $66,000 per annum, while the figure at the bottom end of the range is just over $52,000. (Admittedly, Indeed’s sample size here is statistically undernourished.) The much higher salaries paid to UI Designers are a result of the greater training and technical competency they possess when compared to Web Designers. UI Designers, although not coders per se, have a certain amount of hard technical knowledge at their disposal, and this additional knowledge translates into additional wages.

User Experience Designer

Despite the fact that UX design requires less technical knowledge than UI design, the salary figures for positions in the field are substantially higher. The average annual UX Designer salary in Alamo City is just over $108,000, while the lowest reported salary for the field is approximately $90,000 per annum. UX Design is a creative discipline, just like web design, but the thing you’re designing is something abstract rather than something tangible: UX designers create an experience rather than just establishing the look of a site. Additional skills are required for UX design (including the need to understand the complex research that goes into their work), but, going by the numbers alone, you might do well to plan to shift the focus of your career into the UX lane at some point.

User Experience Researcher

UX Researchers are, rather obviously, the people who perform and collect the research upon which the Designers base their visions for a website’s experience. Essentially, they research how people use websites and what people who’d use the site on which they’re working expect to find. It can be an interesting field (especially if you enjoy the research process), and, again, according to Indeed’s figures, it turns out to pay better than web design. It might be a stretch to break into the field with just design training behind you, but you should consider that the average salary for UX Researchers in San Antonio is just over $63,000.

Web Design Classes Near Me

The Alamo Colleges District is one of many institutions of higher learning that have partnered with edtech company Ed2Go to provide certificate courses that prepare graduates to integrate themselves into the workforce upon completion of their programs. Although based out of San Antonio, the program is, in actuality, a self-paced course that runs for 390 course hours and that you have a year to complete. The curriculum is very broad-based, and includes training in Adobe Animate and Photoshop to increase the range of visuals you can include in your web designs. The course otherwise covers all the expected material, going more deeply into advanced JavaScript functions than some of the live offerings available online.

While there are no live in-person classes in web design to be found in Greater San Antonio, that is no reason to despair: there are plenty of live online courses available, at least one of which is sure to suit your needs and budget. Noble Desktop offers a Web Design Certificate program that covers HTML, CSS, and front-end JavaScript before moving on to Figma, some UI design concepts, WordPress, and a module in using HTML for automating emails. You’ll need six weeks to complete the program full-time, and closer to six months if you want to take the course’s part-time version.

If your interests lie more specifically in the UX and UI direction, Noble Desktop has a certificate program in those subjects as well. The UX & UI Design Certificate will prepare you for both fields, and includes extensive training in design theory, user testing, and prototyping, as well as how to use Figma. As the curriculum targets the design side of the coin, the course includes no instruction in scripting. You will again need some six weeks to complete the program full-time, while the part-time version will call upon six months of your time.

These Noble Desktop certificate programs include 1-to-1 mentoring sessions with a professional Designer who can offer you valuable advice, be it to clarify something covered in class, or to prepare you for the job search process by everything from resume polishing to mock interviews. Also included with either course is a free retake option that is good for one year, access to recordings of the day’s classes, and Noble’s proprietary classroom materials and workbooks, which are yours to keep after the course. Noble Desktop offers a variety of financing options.

General Assembly is a further online school that specializes in professional tech education. It provides a UX Design Bootcamp, which is just another word for a certificate program (since you'll get a certificate at the end of the program), and which can be completed in 12 weeks. The curriculum goes into wireframing, user research, usability testing, prototyping, visual design, and a quick stop-off to learn some UI design principles as well. A part-time option is available, as are numerous financing options.

Web Design Corporate Training

People seeking to start new careers aren’t the only ones who can benefit from web design training. You may have a great team working for you that, for any one of several good reasons, might need more web design knowledge than they might possess in the aggregate. Noble Desktop can provide you with corporate training, be it onsite anywhere in San Antonio or online anywhere but in Turkmenistan, Eritrea, and North Korea. Noble’s corporate training is bespoke and tailor the curriculum to your exact specifications.

Noble Desktop also offers a voucher program that will allow members of your team to take one or more of the school’s regularly scheduled classes. Multiple purchases entail handsome discounts. You can reach out to Noble Desktop’s Corporate Sales department for further particulars on its corporate training options.