But what you really need to do to broaden that technical aspect of your development is to read voraciously about usability, information architecture, best practices in web standards and accessibility – a broad knowledge. It’s the kind of stuff that comes from just understanding over time why it’s not a good thing to do something and how you might overcome specific difficulties. You start to then understand CSS beyond the “getting it to work” stage and find you know why position relative fixes something or how to trigger hasLayout. Things like understanding a little about interface design – read Bill Buxton’s book, for example. It’s not a knowledge that comes from a small sharp effort, but it’s what you’d pick up from conferences and friendships and general social absorbtion.

I’m not totally convinced this industry works well from the courses perspective though. The ones I’ve seen don’t achieve as much as they claim, but given the right teacher you can at least walk away with the tools to learn. I’ve reviewed a number of decent books on this site and they often have good ideas and code.

But mainly doing is learning. And try not to spend every day blogging or reading. One hour a day reading maximum… then work.

The thing to take away from web design is that it’s really a general umbrella name for a number of jobs ranging from business marketing through to graphic design, programming, information architecture, user behaviour and human psychology. Learn lots about humans and limitations.

Hope that helps. Email Russ Weakley at maxdesign.com.au and ask the same question. He runs the web standards group. They have a lot of resources to teach about HTML and CSS best practices.