Free online courses: design, development and marketing

Here at N0BS Agency, we’re consistently teaching our clients about our trade. Many people think we’re crazy, as we’re “pushing business away”. But we believe in giving back, and the education part is all part of our service as a personal, creative agency.

We understand that the COVID-19 situation has put a lot of people in a difficult position financially and many now do not know what direction they want to go in with their creative projects. So, lots of projects have now been put on hold and some have been cancelled entirely.

Due to finances being tight for everyone, many people will no longer be able to afford our professional services and they will need to do their own design, development and marketing. Therefore, we thought we’d recommend some incredible resources where you can learn these skills online, for free!

Major brands are now supporting businesses through COVID-19 by providing access to amazing learning resources online for free, when these courses were available in person for thousands of pounds. Definitely take the opportunity to take advantage of this and turn yourself into a creative genius!

These are also great options if you’ve taken the difficult decision to furlough your staff and you want them to keep busy in the meantime! Let them learn some new skills so they can be extra valuable when they come back to work!

Free online graphic design classes

We do all our graphic design from the Adobe Creative Cloud. We basically live on Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, but there are so many incredible apps in the Adobe Creative Cloud that we’re spoilt for choice.

Knowing how to utilise these powerful programmes well is an essential part of our job. Now, becoming a graphic designer is a little more than just knowing your way around Photoshop, but the Adobe Digital Learning Services is a great platform to get instructor-led training from your device! Right now, they are offering free Adobe training, free Marketo training and free Magento training until June 30th.

This is a way to get design, development and marketing training by industry experts… for free!

Free online coding classes

We’ve not known these guys to offer in-person training, but we absolutely love their platform! Codeacademy have a great pathway to learn the basics of web development (HTML, CSS and JS) with instant feedback and results. We often refer our junior developers who are still in training to this platform for practice!

You can even study data science, programming and computer science here… all for free!

If you’re interested in using it to train your team, then they have special business packages where you can get discounted rates for bulk purchases and everyone in the team can obtain certifications.

Free online marketing classes

Our number one favourite resource for learning about digital marketing is HubSpot! They have a HubSpot Academy where you can learn valuable skills and obtain digital marketing certifications. They courses are done in bitesize modules so you don’t get too tired when learning. HubSpot is a hugely powerful marketing and sales tool, so learning directly from them will help you utilise their platform to its full potential. However, the skills you learn in their academy are not only applicable to using the HubSpot software, but can be applied in any form of digital marketing.

Free online workshops in various industries

Another company we really value the content of is General Assembly. We’ve also sent juniors to training by them and had great feedback. Their courses are quite costly, but that’s because you learn a great deal in a short space of time, so it’s intense, but the rewards are very big.

They’ve always had both an in-person and online offering, but naturally their in-person classes are closed due to COVID-19, but their online courses are running as normal.

However, in addition to this, they’re offering FREE FRIDAYS where they provide introductory classes across a wide range of topics for free each Friday! This seems to run into June only, so make the most of them while you can!