Everybody is online these days. Even the smallest companies need a web presence, and it can seem like the world and their mother (and father) have their own personal webpage. And with today's advances in web-design software, websites have never been easier to design and publish, even for people who aren't particularly computer savvy. A basic web design nightcourse can teach you how to use these applications and give you the tips and advice to design your own website.

The two main web-design programmes you will encounter on a web-design nightcourse are Frontpage and Dreamweaver, with Dreamweaver being by far the most popular. These applications are maybe only just a little more difficult to get the hang of than (for example) word processing applications such as Microsoft Word.

The majority of webpages are built using HyperText Mark-up Language or HTML. This is a fairly complex programming language made up of commands that tell your web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox etc) how to display all the elements that make up your webpage e.g. text, images, tables, animations etc. However you don't have to learn any HTML to produce pretty complex webpages, as the applications do most of the hard work for you.

Dreamweaver and Frontpage are WYSIWIG editors (What You See is What You Get), which means that the HTML code is hidden and what you see on screen as you are working on the page is pretty close to what the end user will see when they view the page in their browser. For example if you want to type a line of text and make it bold, you do exactly as you would in Word and the programme adds the HTML tags itself, or if you want to insert an image, you just hit the insert image button. The application also keeps control of all the pages in your website, and shows you how they all link together, as well as actually putting your pages up onto the internet.

Introductory webdesign courses will give you a good working knowledge of one of these applications and even people who have little or no experience of the internet can soon design professional looking pages full of text, images, buttons, tables, menus and links by following set instructions. At this level it is straightforward to produce decent basic websites for personal or business use.

You will have probably noticed how many webpages these days incorporate much more than just text and images. Dreamweaver is also capable of doing more complex tasks, and creating more feature rich sites. More advanced courses will deal with elements such as online forms, search functions, incorporating databases, animations, streaming audio and video files, and secure e-commerce features such as shopping carts. Working with most of these elements is not too difficult, as the application continues to do most of the programming work for you.

A good web design course will also teach you more than just the technical aspects. You should get handy design and layout tips to make your websites pleasing to the eye and easy to use, learn conventions and guidelines for layout and navigation, and also learn how to drive traffic to your website and get noticed by google and other search engines.

As internet connections speed up, some websites are incorporating all kinds of bells and whistles - the most common of which are Flash animations. Flash is an application which can be used to design animations, banners, games and interactive buttons for use in webpages. These can range from opening sequences you see when first viewing a page, to animated banner ads, to fully interactive games.

A basic Flash course can have you creating short animations and interactive buttons fairly quickly. You will learn frame-by-frame animation techniques, tweening (when one image evolves into another) and how to add sound and embed video clips. Actionscript is the programming language behind Flash, and advanced students will become familiar with this, however you don't need to be a programmer to use most of Flash's features.

Other more advanced courses which are maybe more suited to professional web designers, and which we don't have room to go into here, include ASP programming, Java, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, XHTML and XML.

It is probably easier than you think to design your own website. An introductory web-design course, which introduces you to a one of the basic software applications, can have you online in jig time!