You can’t be a great web designer just by learning the basics and using them the way you think they should be used. You have to widen your horizons and see the way that other web designers work and how they create certain parts of a site.
This can be achieved easily with the help of tutorials, whether they are video tutorials or text based, written by rock star web designers. In the same time, you have to check the discussions that are taken around the web design community to stay up to date and watch the trends. To do all these, I prepared a list of sites which I frequently check.
Codrops
Codrops had a huge ascension thanks to its tutorials about CSS3, HTML5 and various attractive jQuery techniques. If you want to learn new code tricks and techniques, this is the place where you should start.
Tutorialzine
Tutorialzine lost its pace and doesn’t post as many tutorials as it did a while ago but is a really good resource for top notch tutorials.
CSS Tricks. Levels: Beginner – Intermediate – Advanced
If you were searching for a piece of code or a snippet you’ve surely stumbled across Chris Coyier’s site. It has an abundance of CSS tutorials and tricks and it is really helpful that he categorized his tutorials by basic, intermediate and advanced.
Coding.SmashingMagazine
This extended category features articles on client-side and server-side programming languages, tools, frameworks and libraries, as well as back-end issues. Even if it’s a part of SmashingMagazine and it has more editorial posts than actual things you can use, it is still a resource that shouldn’t be overlooked.
HTML5 Rocks
I found this little beast while searching for HTML5 tutorials and I wasn’t disappointed. It is the site with the most HTML5 tutorials on the web. Kudos to the person who actually reads them all.
The Code Player
I believe this is the first of its kind and it’s a really cool concept too. There are various neat effects done with the help of CSS3 and HTML5 which are explained or shown step by step in an innovative manner.
All The Cheat Sheets An Up To Date Web Designer Needs: CSS3, HTML5 and jQuery
This is an article I’ve written a while back that brings together the useful cheat sheets of the three main technologies of web design, updated with for their new versions. A lot of people find these useful because they don’t have to search through search engines for a little snippet anymore.
31 CSS Code Snippets To Make You A Better Coder
Although this article doesn’t have all the snippets that a designer uses, it has the most common he needs to use, or, better said, a selection of the most common he needs to use.
Alessio Atzeni’s site
Alessio is a passionate web designer who writes tutorials where he also shows the techniques he uses. He started doing this as a self-promotion but now succeeded in having a really cool collection of CSS3 tutorials.
Red Team Design
Even if they don’t have the articles categorized and you have to search a lot to find a thing that you are looking for, they have an interesting collection of tutorials that you should see.
DeveloperDrive
This is a new site but which started aggressively by publishing a lot of tutorials for web designers and web developers. I’ve kept an eye on it for a while and I recommend it to you too.
InspectElement
InspectElement has only three pages of tutorials but they are worth checking out. They have relatively short articles of easy to use and awesome effects.
WebDesignerWall
Nick La’s site is one of the first sites that were publishing tutorials for web designers. It has a lot of tutorials that you would want to see and learn.
HTML5 Doctor – Helping you implement HTML5 today
CSS Basics
Net.Tutsplus
The Tuts network is a huge tutorial resource, most likely the biggest in the webdev department and proof of that are the ~100k subscribers that are following it. The tutorials are categorized and you can find easily something.
WebDesign,Tutsplus
Although I don’t support creating a new site which does almost the same thing as the previous one, you will find here useful things.
W3Schools
I didn’t use much W3Schools when learning how to code but its an encyclopedia when it comes to explanations and snippets. If you are searching something on a search engine about a CSS property you will most likely find a W3Schools page. That says a lot about the site.
Lynda.com
Lynda is well known for its abundance of tutorials for various software. You can learn a lot from this site if you have the time to watch videos.
Treehouse
Treehouse is in my opinion the best in this video tutorials niche mostly because there are a lot of top notch professionals working on it and where could you learn better than from the best.
Learnable
Learnable is a growing library of online books and online courses tailored to the specific needs of web designers and developers. Whether you’re just starting out, or seasoned pro looking to brush up on the next hot language, Learnable’s got you covered.
