Need to boost your skills in web design and development? Access free online courses from leading universities and technology experts.
Here is a list of free courses to improve your skills in web design and development. There are courses on the design process, interactive design, user interface design, artificial intelligence, coding, and more. Several of the courses are within larger specializations.
Free Courses on Design and Development
Introduction to Design Thinking. Design Thinking is a creative process that combines thoughtful user research with rapid iteration. Get an introduction to the design thinking process, with best practices for each step along the way. This course is part of the Microsoft Professional Program in Entry-Level Software Development.
Microsoft
Instructional Design: Digital Media, New Tools and Technology. From the University of Maryland, this course will help you explore the design, development, and integration of digital media to enhance the learning experience and investigate how media, emerging and mobile tools, and online applications impact technology-mediated learning environments. This course is part of the Instructional Design and Technology MicroMasters Program.
Interaction Design Specialization. From The Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego, this course series will help you to learn (a) how to generate design ideas, (b) techniques for quickly prototyping them, and (c) how to use prototypes to get feedback from other stakeholders such as your teammates, clients, and users. You’ll also learn principles of visual design, perception, and cognition that inform effective interaction design.
Web Design for Everybody. From the University of Michigan, this course series covers how to write syntactically correct HTML5 and CSS3, and how to create interactive web experiences with JavaScript. Within the series, learn to design and implement a responsive site for a minimum of three platforms.
Design Thinking and Creativity for Innovation. From The University of Queensland, this course covers the fundamentals of how design thinking and creativity can be used to enable innovation. Learn the process and tools of design thinking and the skills to harness creativity and improve observation.
University of Queensland Australia
Introduction to Web Development. From the University of California, Davis, this course is designed to start you on a path toward future studies in web development and design, no matter how little experience or technical knowledge you currently have. By the end of this course, you’ll be able to describe the structure and functionality of the World Wide Web, create dynamic web pages using a combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, apply essential programming language concepts when creating HTML forms, select an appropriate web hosting service, and publish your web pages. Finally, you’ll be able to develop a working model for creating personal and business websites.
Getting Started with the Web. From Mozilla, this is a concise series introducing you to the practicalities of web development. You’ll set up the tools you need to construct a simple web page and publish your own simple code. By working through the tutorials, you’ll go from nothing to getting your first web page online.
Introduction to Bootstrap – A Tutorial. This course is a primer on Bootstrap, the open source project created by Twitter to enable responsive, mobile first web pages. By the end of the three modules, you will have gained the knowledge to create pages common to all web applications and implement the most frequently used components and classes provided by Bootstrap. You will also see how to use the tooling provided by Visual Studio to assist you in creating pages as quickly as possible.
Product Design: The Delft Design Approach. This course is an introduction to the Delft Design Approach. From Delft University, learn a model and a set of signature methods to get from understanding the user in context to delivering a great design. The course challenges you to experience the design process and reflect on your work with the help of students and excellent teaching staff from Delft and industrial experts.
Delft University of Technology
Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. This course provides an overview of A.I. Learn how software can be used to process, analyze, and extract meaning from natural language, images, and video. Find out how to build intelligent bots that enable conversational communication between humans and A.I. systems. This course is part of the Microsoft Professional Program in Artificial Intelligence.
Building Dynamic Websites. From the Harvard Extension School, learn how to build dynamic websites with Ajax and with Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Also learn how to set up domain names with DNS, how to structure pages with XHTML and CSS, how to program in JavaScript and PHP, how to configure Apache and MySQL, how to design and query databases with SQL, how to use Ajax with both XML and JSON, and how to build mashups. Explore issues of security, scalability, and cross-browser support and enterprise-level deployments of websites.
HTML5 and CSS Fundamentals. Learn HTML5 and CSS — the basic building blocks of web design and style — to give your site a professional look and feel. Experts from Microsoft and the World Wide Web Consortium guide you step by step in how to use the latest web standards to create your website.
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for Web Developers. From Johns Hopkins University, this course is geared to anyone who is interested in starting in web development. Learn the basic tools that every web page coder needs to know. Start from the ground up by learning how to implement modern web pages with HTML and CSS. This course allows the students to follow a real-world project with a real client from the initial conversation with a customer to fully coding her website.
Building Interactive Prototypes using JavaScript. Learn how to turn a static web front-end into something that users can interact with. Learn the fundamentals of JavaScript and how to apply JavaScript to enhance the interactivity of web pages. By the end of this course, you’ll have a web app prototype that allows basic interaction. This course is part of the Microsoft Professional Program in Entry-Level Software Development.
UX Design: From Wireframe to Prototype. From the University of Michigan, this course will show you how to take a set of wireframes and interaction architecture and embody it in an interactive prototype. This course is part of the User Experience Research and Design MicroMasters Program.
University of Michigan
Introduction to Mobile Application Development using Android. Learn the basics of mobile application development. The course will introduce you to the Android platform, Android application components, activities and their lifecycle, user interface design, multimedia, 2D graphics, and networking support in Android.
Writing Professional Code – Advanced Topics. From Microsoft, learn how to improve the performance of your code with advanced techniques not covered in textbooks. This course explores the most critical techniques that will get you through the vast majority of coding scenarios. These include debugging, unit test skills, object-oriented design principles, choice of correct data structures, and parallel programming.
CS50’s Computer Science for Business Professionals. From Harvard University, this is an introduction to computer science for business professionals, designed for managers, product managers, founders, and decision-makers more generally. This course takes a top-down approach, emphasizing mastery of high-level concepts and design decisions, through lectures on computational thinking, programming languages, internet technologies, web development, technology stacks, and cloud computing.
CS50’s Web Programming with Python and JavaScript. This Harvard University course dives deeply into the design and implementation of web apps with Python, JavaScript, and SQL using frameworks such as Flask, Django, and Bootstrap. Topics include database design, scalability, security, and user experience. Through hands-on projects, learn to write and use APIs, create interactive UIs, and leverage cloud services such as GitHub and Heroku.
CS50’s Mobile App Development with React Native. From Harvard University, learn about mobile app development with React Native, a popular framework maintained by Facebook that enables cross-platform native apps using JavaScript without Java or Swift. Through hands-on projects, you’ll gain experience with React and its paradigms, app architecture, and user interfaces. The course culminates in a final project for which you’ll implement an app entirely of your own design.