The Best Courses for Learning How To Build Websites (2024)

Price: $199
Instructor: Bryan Guerra
Skill Level: Beginner
Lectures: 17
Total Time: 3 hours

If you want to learn the website-building basics, this course is an excellent starter tutorial. It has six top-level sections that are designed to get you up and running with a website builder in quick fashion. The instructor, Bryan Guerra, uses Wix in his lessons.

With How to Build Your Own Website, you'll learn the importance of placing vital information above the fold, the advantages of purchasing your own domain and having branded email addresses, and other website-related concepts.

My one gripe with Guerra's otherwise competent instruction? He suggests searching Google to find photos for your website. That could lead to legal issues. Thankfully, he also mentions that you can tap Wix's built-in image library to round up site photos.

Price: $194
Instructor: Andrew Williams
Skill Level: Beginner
Lectures: 90
Total Time: 8.5 hours

WordPress: It's considered the world's most popular content management system, as the free, open-source software is estimated to power more than 30 percent of the world wide web. WordPress' ease of use, and wonderful theme and plug-in ecosystem, make its mass adoption quite understandable. In fact, CNN, TED, and CBSRadio are just three of the many well-known sites that use WordPress on the back end.

WordPress for Beginners is just what its SEO-friendly title suggests: basic, but thorough, WordPress lessons. Instructor Andrew Williams explains the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, posts and pages, and static page vs. a blog-style homepage. The videos really highlight the CMS' robust functionality.

Price: $94.99
Instructor: Manuj Aggarwal
Skill Level: Beginner
Lectures: 33
Total Time: 3 hours and 21 minutes

Joomla, an open-source content management system, may not be as popular as WordPress, but it's a fine alternative to that popular CMS. Like WordPress, Joomla has thousands of free themes and extensions to help you shape your website.

Joomla for Beginners sees the instructor, Manuj Aggarwal, demonstrate how to install Joomla on a server using a web host's file manager, explain the benefits of using Joomla instead of building a site from scratch, and serve up quizzes between segments to hammer home site-building techniques. If you're a Joomla novice, this is a terrific place to start learning about the CMS.

Price: $199
Instructor: Edwin Diaz
Skill Level: All
Lectures: 343
Total Time: 37 hours and 45 minutes

Edwin Diaz's in-depth, 343-part PHP for Beginners teaches the ins and outs of the PHP web development language in an easy-to-learn fashion. You'll learn to use databases, object oriented programming, and other PHP-related topics as you move from basic understanding to more advanced ideas.

The instruction, combined with the resources and exercise files, teaches you how to create a content management system, use AJAX to submit data to the server without refreshing the page, debug code, use an API to bring data from a database to a graphical interface, and other tasks.

Price: $199
Instructor: Jonas Schmedtmann
Skill Level: Beginner
Lectures: 165
Total Time: 27 hours and 53 minutes

Jonas Schmedtmann teaches how JavaScript works in a mix of theory and practical exercises. The 165 lectures cover numerous JavaScript topics, including variables, data types, and arrays.

With Complete JavaScript Course 2019, you'll learn how to use Brackets.io—an open source text editor—for writing code. In addition, the included resource files contain starter and final code to tinker with as you learn. As part of the instruction, you'll code a simple game that requires JavaScript to interact with HTML within a web browser environment.

Price: $199
Instructor: Jonas Schmedtmann
Skill Level: All
Lectures: 78
Total Time: 12 hours and 25 minutes

Instructor Jonas Schmedtann strikes again! With Build Responsive Real World Websites With HTML5 and CSS3, you'll learn the HTML5 and CSS3 coding languages (as well as a bit of jQuery) to build websites that are both attractive and functional.

However, the course is more than just coding; you'll also learn web design basics and how to implement cool visual effects. Schmedtmann includes his ebook, Best Resources for Web Design and Development with HTML5 & CSS3, that provides valuable supplemental material.

Price: $19.99
Instructor: Stephen McKinney
Skill Level: All
Lectures: 5
Total Time: 31 minutes

Despite Slack, Workplace by Facebook, and other communication tools making headway into the work environment, email is still a vital part of business. After all, it's one of the easiest ways to ask a query, send a file, or drop a friendly hello.

Email Marketing 2018: Create a Custom Business Email Address highlights this importance and walks you through the step-by-step business email creation process. Instructor Stephen McKinney demonstrates how to use Namecheap to create a custom business email address, sign up for a website hosting plan, and then connecting the two using the required CNAME and MX records.

This course also highlights the differences between .com, .net, and other extensions, and touches upon ICANN and Whois/WhoisGuard.

Price: $119
Instructor: Clinton Gorman
Skill Level: All
Lectures: 66
Total Time: 3 hours and 50 minutes

If you're looking to set up shop online, How to Create Make Build an Online Ecommerce Store Website is for you. This oddly named course focuses on Woocommerce, but many of the ideas presented here can be used with other e-commerce platforms.

The instructor, Clinton Gorman, teaches you how to find images that you can use commercially, create an eye-catching logo, master SEO, explore affiliate marketing, and set up payment gateways.

Price: Included with LinkedIn Learning's $29.99 per month (or $19.99 per month with an annual subscription) plan
Instructor: Daniel Lachance
Skill Level: Beginner
Lectures: 4
Total Time: 2 hours and 24 minutes

Learning SSL/TLS is a course that teaches you the skills needed to plan, implement, and maintain Secure Socket Layer and Transport Layer Security certificates. If you're not familiar with those security protocols, here's the skinniest of skinnies: they're used to safeguard the data that travels through websites, email, VPN, and other network communications.

Instructor Daniel Lachance shows how SSL and TLS certificates are issued and managed, how digital signatures provide authentication, and other related topics.

Although this is an introduction to SSL and TLS, this course requires that you have some familiarity with TCP/IP, Microsoft Windows Server, Linux, web browser configuration, and web server configuration.

Price: Included with LinkedIn Learning's $29.99 per month (or $19.99 per month with an annual subscription) plan
Instructor: Mike Benkovich
Skill Level: Beginner
Lectures: 8
Total Time: 2 hours and 25 minutes

One ASP.NET gets you down and dirty with building websites using Model View Controller technology. Instructor Mike Benkovich teaches the essentials, and explains how Model View Controllers operate and how data is passed between them.

Though this is a beginner course, you'll create an ASP.NET MVC-powered project, implement JavaScript, and deploy Amazon Web Services via Azure.