This article was published on July 9, 2015

Planning to build your own website? Here’s what you should know


Planning to build your own website? Here’s what you should know

At TNW Academy, we’ve recently teamed up with Ryan Bonhardt, who’s mainly known for his enthusiastic and effective teaching tactics. Students simply love the way he makes building websites so easy and engaging. But you can go see for yourself! You can now find Ryan’s online course at TNW Academy.

Want to know more? Read on as Ryan gives insight into this exciting new course in an exclusive interview with The Next Web.

Who is this course for?

I personally think this course is for anyone. Basically, these days if you want to put something up on the internet you should at least know HTML and CSS. Sure you can use drag-and-drop editors or website builders, but you lose flexibility. You lose the ability to create 100 percent what you want.

You can also hire, but I feel, and have seen it happen, without any experience in this area you have nothing to judge your estimates on. You’ll get a website estimate for $500 and one for $15K and not be able to even understand the difference. You’ll end up choosing a mid-range price because you don’t want something too cheap, but not too expensive and they gave you a decent estimate and had a good sales department. You won’t understand the lingo in the contract etc.

But that’s kind of a generic answer so here’s how I’ve structured this course to help as many people as possible:

Entrepreneurs
Want to build an online business? Then this is the course for you. You’ll learn HTML and CSS fast and have your first landing page up in less than a week to test your idea.

Josh Hagler took his knowledge from this course to test his business idea and build the website for his college startup RoomScapeU. Jay Mayu took our course and in less than a week had his first paid client. You can achieve these results too.

Designers who want to get better jobs and increase their salary
Nowadays, companies are looking for more than just a graphic designer. They’re looking for designers that can make their designs come to life on a webpage through HTML and CSS. Don’t take our word for it? Listen to our students:

“Around two months ago I graduated from the University of Applied Sciences in Rotterdam as a User Experience Designer. Pretty awesome but soon I discovered there was not a lot of work in this area of expertise. So to enhance my chances for a suitable job I decided to improve my front-end skills. Every company wants people with programming skills nowadays. Since I advertised that in my motivational letters and mentioning it in my CV I have multiple invitation from companies to get to know each other.” – Ruud Visser, Graduate from University of Applied Sciences in Rotterdam

Coders that want to learn HTML and CSS fast
“Excellent course that exposed me step-by-step to the world of Web design. I come from a computer programming background and never really had to build a site from scratch. This was a great tool in pushing me to be a more well-rounded tech person.” – Khalid

Complete beginners
“Absolutely awesome! I recommend this course to anyone who feels like learning to code is too hard to start off with, because it really isn’t. I thought it was too hard, but Ryan makes it look really easy with his step for step increase in difficulty. I built my own website within a week after starting this course, and it looks really great. Keep it up, Ryan!” – Robert de Kok

Those that have tried to learn HTML and CSS before and stopped
“This is the first time I was able to go from start to finish with making an entire site. I have done other training before but they don’t ever seem to close it off at the end. This class went over everything needed to make a site. I would love to find other courses like this. I also did not feel dumb mid way through the course due to lack of explaining. Everything was well documented and covered. Very good job on this thanks.” – Jay Mims

Hustlers who want promotions
“Man, I would have to say this is hands down the best course ever! I’ve done a ton of certifications, training, and real-world experience in other areas of IT. Nothing I’ve done so far has been as rewarding and I felt like making something and actually have the necessary skills to do so, without looking elsewhere. Thanks for this, I am at a loss for words; I hope this helped articulate how thankful I am. Thank you!” – Cortell Shaw

What made you want to create this course?

interactiondesign

When I got out of college I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do, but I remembered liking my one programming course I took and it was right during the craze of Web startups so I decided to try to learn how to make websites. It looked hard, but fun so it was right up my alley.

Well I taught myself along with books and courses and none of them seemed to really be that great. I thought, “I shouldn’t have to go through 5+ course and multiple books just to learn the beginning components of HTML and CSS.” Plus during this time I had worked with some other Web developers and realized that they lacked a lot of the basics it took to put out quality work.

From these two experiences I wondered if there was a better way to learn. So I created a blog post outlining how I would teach myself if I had to do it all over again in a much shorter time concentrating specifically on the 20 percent that was used 80 percent of the time.

People read my post and really enjoyed it, but had a lot of questions. From that I decided to create a course. And people have loved it so far so I’m happy with it!

You deem yourself a learning enthusiast.
Talk more about this.

Ha. I’m learning enthusiast because that’s one of the times when I’m happiest – when I’m challenging myself and learning new things. I think it’s important to constantly learn new things and challenge yourself. It’s fun and rewarding and with the internet’s prominence and online learning exploding we’re at a time now where you can literally learn anything.

I could go online today and learn anything – scrapbooking, water color painting, the perfect golf swing, coding, anything. The only thing that’s hard is curating which courses are worth taking or not, so I think your Academy has the potential to be something huge. You do the hard work of identifying the quality courses for your people and they can just trust you and learn from the best.

If learning to build beautiful responsive websites has been in your “to-do list” then follow along as Ryan reveals the fastest and most effective ways to learn HTML5/CSS3 and other vital tools.

Learn more about the online course

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