Continuing Education in Rochester

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HaloGirl
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I'm a graphic designer who specializes in print, but I'm realizing I need to expand my web design skills, so I've been contemplating taking some kind of continuing education class(es) to build my skill set. I'm not looking for an advanced degree, just some technical training. Any suggestions?

Does anyone have any experience with the Genesee Center for the Arts? They're offering a basic web design class this fall with a focus on Dreamweaver. It sounds like it would be useful to me since I have Dreamweaver and can get by using a template someone else has created, but wouldn't know how to start something from scratch.

My other option would be to partner with a web-tech-savvy person, which is what I've done with clients in the past - I design the look of the site and their tech person builds it.

This is a very difficult thing for me to dive into because I started in graphic design AFTER the software became WYSIWYG, so I never had to deal with the programming end of things, which allowed me to focus strictly on design. And although many web-building apps are getting more WYSIWYG, it may never become as easy as my design software just due to the nature of the web (requiring flexible programming for different browsers).

Any help would be very appreciated!
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Matt
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most smart websites designed today (this web site not included) are not build from scratch rather they are built on platforms like Nuke, wordpress, joomla, PHPBB, etc.
You may want to look into tinkering with those platforms and get into designing themes for them.
If you build a website in Dreamweaver, you can build a basic website with only a little functionality unless you learn javascript.
Those platforms have all that built into it, you just have to apply designs to them.
CSS is really what designers should learn when it comes to the web.

Wordpress is probably the easiest to start, but you will be hard-pressed to find courses. If you can learn from books, there are plenty. Of just get a webhost like mine and start playing around with it. the host even assists with the install... then you just download free themes and adjust them to make your own designs.
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HaloGirl
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Thanks, Mattt. You've just confirmed that breaking into this is pretty complicated. Truth is, I probably would never be building a site "from scratch," rather reworking something that already exists. So the question becomes what to learn since different clients would likely be working from different platforms.

The current task that would be most valuable to me right now is learning how to design an HTML e-mail for an e-newsletter (from scratch). Any suggestions?
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Matt
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You could probably get by with basic HTML, but when you use HTML in a newsletter a lot of the rules change.
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