How to Take Advantage of FREE Online Courses

It’s the new year and it’s time to make resolutions. If you plan to build a site or just want to expand an existing site, it’s time to learn some of the ins and outs of web design, programming and even some of the new sciences such as data analysis. You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on new courses and classes. You can take advantage of free courses offered around the web.

Web Design

Plenty of free courses offer you a way to get some design skills without paying thousands of dollars on courses. The difficult part (and the costly part) is that you need the software for web design. Adobe Photoshop, for instance, is used to create layouts and designs that are later cut up into HTML components. Photoshop is a monthly charge, or you can pay for the year.

Online sites such as Udemy and Pluralsight have great courses for web design. You just need the software to practice what the teacher shows you. It can be difficult at first, but it will help you with simple design tasks for your site.

Programming

Programming is one of the biggest reasons to take advantage of an online course. If you’re a site owner, you can help yourself by learning how your site works. You can then make small changes and even fix bugs instead of relying on a programmer. You will probably still need a developer for larger tasks, but you can make minor changes to your site without affecting its functionality.

There are plenty of sites to choose from to help get you started with programming. Udemy, Khan Academy, Coursera and Pluralsight are just a few sites that offer training for programming. You can learn any language too, but it’s best to learn one that matches your site. Ruby, C#, PHP, and VB.NET are just a few of the popular web coding languages.

Content Writing

Content writing seems easy until you sit down and need to figure out how to make an article that appeals to users and search engines. While you need to write naturally, you also need to optimize your content so that search engines are able to index you properly.

This can be done with a few courses. Again, Udemy is a good place to start for the search engine optimization part of it, but places such as Harvard online learning tutorials are better for the actual grammar and spelling. Your content should be quality, and a good topic along with the right writing skills are necessary.

General Business

Whether you’re starting a business or need to learn more, general business courses are a must. Harvard, EDX, and Coursera are good places to learn financial analysis and data science. These courses can help you push your online venture to the next level.

Even if your business is doing well, it will help you expand and push your business into the future with a few good courses, and they are totally free.