: Learning web design with limited options I need some guidelines as to where to start, what to learn (everything I need to learn to do the job of web design). I'm having quite a bit of free

@Ravi4787994

Wordpress is still very popular, so maybe learn to customize it and build your own themes.

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@Sent7350415

As a dev I strongly recommend 2 background subjects that are core for web design: Software development and Networking.
In order to properly code even simple web pages you should be aware of the process of defining solutions in the problem scope and terminology, Object Oriented design and some data structures available for different tasks.
Networking is essential to realizing the flow of data on the web, and identifiying different related issues: DNS, CDN, Performance, Security (SSL, CORS) etc'

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@Shelton719

I assume you have your supervisors permission to learn this in your 'free time', so why not ask to install certain pieces of (free) software?

Do you have any software so far to use for webdesign?
A code editor, an image editor, etc.

You could start doing tutorials from great sites like tutsplus or alike, but you are probably going to need a piece of software at some point in the process. It's just as important to get familiar with the software as anything.

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@Jessie844

The first thing you should be doing is getting better at HTML and CSS. The Codeacademy course is a good intro to the subject, but you need to write more code to truly internalize it.

The next step would be to look into learning more advanced CSS. Look into preprocessors, such as Sass, Less or Stylus. My personal recommendation would be Sass with the SCSS variety (http://sass-lang.com/). Sass over the alternatives due to the sheer amount of open source projects using Sass over others, Bootstrap is also in the process of changing to Sass from Less. There are several good resources online for getting into Sass. One word of advice: Never EVER nest selectors (at least until you understand why you shouldn't overqualify your selectors).

Read up on and learn about Object Oriented CSS, SMACSS, BEM, ITCSS and finally start using BEMIT naming conventions (https://csswizardry.com/2013/01/mindbemding-getting-your-head-round-bem-syntax/). CSSWizardry is a very good authority on writing good large scale CSS.

Next step after those, start learning JavaScript and possibly jQuery. Codeacademy has a decent intro to the subject. Once you've learnt HTML/CSS/JS you've got everything you need to be a front end developer. If you're more interested in back end stuff, perhaps you should look into PHP instead of JavaScript.

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