The Top Web Design Schools

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The advent of the Internet plus its subsequent factors which include e-commerce, online portfolios, auction sites and even online marketing has prompted numerous people to choose web designing as a career of choice. As many companies now need to have websites to showcase their products and services and as many small and medium enterprises now venture into online businesses, web designers are in demand as ever. Whether on a freelance or on a regular basis, designers all agree that there’s real and good money in this profession.

Web design, however, doesn’t seem easy as it sounds. There are also basic steps and strategies that need to be learned. While the designer’s own creativity and innate artistic expression are also important things to consider, the designer should also be adept on the various rules of web, content, graphics and marketing management. These should all be infused so that the website, the end product, will not only be appealing to the eye but will also feature all the necessary, functional tools. The web designer should understand what the website should look and feel like so that every visitor will find it user friendly and easy to navigate.

Because of the demand for good web designers these days, many schools have already set up shop and have offered courses for the aspiring designers. The web design schools of today can be categorized into two: offline or brick and mortar and online schools.

There aren’t many differences between the two except that the latter will, as the name implies, offer the teachings and classes via the Internet. The students just need to log on to a specific website with their designated user names and passwords and they will then be brought to a “virtual classroom” of sorts. Skilled and qualified instructors will guide the students by providing relevant theories and practical tests.

Some top web designing schools of today include the International Academy of Design and Technology. It’s an online school which started last May 1, 2007. Students learn basic and advance web design and development at the school and earn a degree in the process.

Vancouver’s Institute of Advanced Media is also a top contender in the web design school industry. They constantly offer various courses for graphic artists and webmasters such as short courses on Dreamweaver and dynamic websites that are suitable for small and medium business enterprises.

Penn Foster Career School (formerly Thomson Education Direct), on the other hand, has been offering distance learning education for many decades now. They have recently added web design to their roster of courses as well as other related studies such as graphic design, interactive media design, information technology and web development. Penn’s courses, which are offered via associate and diploma programs, have long attracted millions of interested students all over the world. With their longstanding favorable reputation as an academic institution of choice, Penn Foster can easily be considered as one of the top web design schools of today.

Another good school where one can master web design is the renowned Tisch School of the Arts at the New York University (NYU). Their offered course in web design combines theory and practice and aims to investigate what it exactly means to work in an environment such as the world wide web. Like all of the departments in the famed NYU, the course features all possible dynamics --- from concepts to experiments to documentaries to diaristics.

Not to be left behind is another Ivy League school. Stanford University’s School of Education Information Technology offers a lot of workshops on Macromedia Flash (both for those in the beginner and intermediate levels) and Dreamweaver as well as on graphic design and multimedia. Here, students learn how to design and upload a web page, how to insert and manipulate tables and create image maps and roll over buttons, among many others.

With the existence of these top web design schools, the future of the Internet can truly be a bright one.