Learning to design / maintain websites

[AdultHumanFemale]

I would like to learn to design and maintain websites, being involved in a couple of projects where the next step would involve having a website. My workplace website is also totally dire, and I cringe at the fact that nobody is able to manage it properly day to day (though it is not technically my responsibility).
I have just searched through the part-time courses / evening classes offered at FE colleges in my city, where I am certain web design courses used to be in frequent supply, but nowhere seems to do them.

1. Are these skills called something else these days, and if so, what should I be searching for?
2. Could I easily pick this up by doing an online course, although I have little experience in this field?

Thank you!

There's lots of online free courses to learn html and css which are a good place to start with to build websites.

If you want to design sites for clients, you need to be using a CMS framework so that when you hand it over to the client, they can maintain it themselves so for this you'd need to learn to build say wordpress templates and for that you need PhP programming and jQuery.

Then there's learning design itself with the basics surrounding hierarchy, good use of typography and white space and how to use imagery and of course the optimisation of those images for use on the web. All this information is available for free online in blogs and courses. I learnt css and html with lynda.com but there's www.codecademy.com/ which you can use for free. Hope this helps a bit... good luck!

Just to add, if it's your workplace website which needs help, you can get a reasonably decent site up and running using Squarespace with no programming experience required. However, to get a well designed functional website for your workplace, it sounds like it would be best to employ a professional to get the site built in a way that's possible for the business to be able to maintain it themselves. Generally amateur designers don't do a good job as there's so much involved in the design process including CRO (conversion rate optimisation which can make a real difference to the functionality of your website).

Sorry for the separate replies - I'm doing bits and pieces and keep thinking of another thing which may help you... .

The reason there are no longer so many 'web design' courses available is that the web design field has changed so much in the last 10 years and now sites generally involve a whole team of people so there are the backend programmers who do the PhP and basically build the Content Management System side of things. Then there are front end programmers and designers who design and shape the front of the website and this also involves UI designers and UX designers who look at the User Interface and User Experience. Then there is Search Engine Optimisation, digital marketing and Conversion Rate Optimisation and all these come together to build one website.

Each field now is a specialism and courses exist for each specialist area so you'd need probably looking for digital design or UX design courses or digital marketing. I'm not sure any of these courses would be good for you unless you wanted to move careers to one of these specialist areas. To learn to help your business, I'd look at getting a professional design company to look at the site and then to get them to train you or someone else to maintain it properly. Use online blogs etc on best practices for websites and take it from there... if there is no budget then try to get it moved onto Squarespace as that's easy for anyone to use for fairly basic websites... good luck!