5 Great Forums for Web Design and Development
Forums are a very popular part of the internet today. They allow members to discuss all sorts of different topics, share knowledge and experience, and learn from each other. I am going to introduce to you 5 different forums on the web that will teach you a ton about website design, website development, and maintaining a website. So strap on your thinking caps, and get ready to delve into these awesome communities!
WebDeveloper.com
The Web Developer Forums, located here
, are full of information and people waiting to help you with your problems. Whenever I have issues that I cannot figure out with my web designs, I always post my questions here first. Contrary to it’s name, this forum actually has a lot more support for web mastering / web designing than the web development side of things. Though there are forums for development, I feel like the design forums are the busiest.
This was one of my first web design forums I ever joined, and it was a great starting point for me when I was first learning web design. The members are very helpful to newbies who are trying to learn the basics, and there are so many helpful articles, it’s like an information goldmine!
Though there are tons of other places you could go for website design discussions, I would say WebDeveloper.com is one of the best to start off at. It’s built running vBulletin, which is the most popular bulletin board script, running alongside Invision Power Board. It would be good to not only familiarize yourself with this forum and it’s members, but also the forum software itself, so when you join more forums later on down the road you will be ready.
Dev Shed Forums
The Dev Shed Forums (http://forums.devshed.com/) are also a very handy reference for web design questions. Though WebDeveloper.com focuses more on the design aspect of things, I feel like Dev Shed has more support with the backend side of things, such as PHP, MySQL, and working with Apache / .htaccess.
If you already have a good grasp on XHTML / CSS, and you are working on learning a backend language for your designs (whether it be PHP, ASP, etc), I would highly recommend the Dev Shed Forums. They have tons of very knowledgeable members who can usually answer your questions relatively quickly and easily, plus help you understand the underlying concepts of the technology.
Digital Point Forums
Digital Point forums, which you can find here, is a whole new type of bulletin board. The last two I’ve shown you were mostly about the design / development of websites. Digital Point, or DP for short, is more about the monetizing of websites, and making money from the internet.
Though you may not be so interested in this if you are looking towards being a programmer in the future, but some people want to try to break into managing a few websites, throwing some ads on there, and making money for running some websites. Though I make it sound to easy, it is possible and people are doing it, and these people are the ones who post on DP. If you are trying to make money with your website through ads, or are thinking of monetizing a website, I would highly recommend checking out the Digital Point Forums, and seeing what you can dig up. There’s tons and tons of information, if you take the time to look around.
Webmaster-Talk
Webmaster-Talk is a general web forum that covers all of the aspects of web design and development. Ranging from simple HTML and CSS design, Graphic Design, domain names or database programming, Webmaster-Talk is a great forum for anybody interested in the web.
There are many different sub-forums based in all of the forums here, so there are tons and tons of diverse users to help answer your questions. Along with such a diverse community, the forums also have a total of over 65,000 members, which is a great accomplishment for any web design / development forum. If you are looking for a simple forum to join just to get started with website design, I would definitely recommend you check out Webmaster-Talk.com (http://www.webmaster-talk.com/).
PHP Builder
The PHP Builder forums (guess where this link leads) are focused towards people looking to learning PHP, or who have general PHP quetions. PHP is the largest backend development language for websites today, and this forum is dedicated to helping you learn more about PHP, essential tips and tricks, and find out answers to your tricky questions.
The members of the community are very helpful and will sometimes write snippets of code for you if you need if needed, but they will always explain their code as well, helping you learn in the process. I have gone here for many of my PHP questions in the past, and I’ve felt the information to be very valuable to my PHP education. Whether you are just starting out and trying to learn PHP, or you are more advanced and have a question, this would be an awesome forum to register with, or even just snoop around in to see if your questions can be answered without a new thread.
So there you have it, 5 of my favorite web design, development, and webmaster forums. If you haven’t already signed up with any of these, I would recommend that you join at least one. Some people are very against forums, trying to conceal identity, etc… but with web design and development, it’s good to have all the help you can get.
If you know of any other awesome forums discussing anything web-related, post ‘em up in the comments!
