This year I took Ben Hunt's Pro Web Design Course. I learned a lot from it – and was able to raise my websites' ranking for several keywords, and got some extra traffic too.
The main reason I took the course was after reading Ben's books Save the Pixel, Convert! and seeing his videos on websiteworks.tv.
There are a lot of good ideas on those books and videos, and good SEO analysis of both a page factors and potential competition for keywords is very important.
The course consists mostly of videos, although there are some downloadable page examples and resources. The videos are downloadable, which is nice for a couple of reasons – first, you can keep them after you are done with the course, and second, you can download and watch them with a player such as GOMPlayer, which allows you to view them at a fast speed. I used 1.2x most of the time, and on subjects I already mostly knew, I'd use 1.5x. That can save quite a bit of your time.
The explanations on the videos are quite clear. The main objective of the course is teaching Web Design as a profession. But if you make your own website (as I do), you can still use almost everything.
The classes range from basic HTML, designing on PhotoShop – pages, buttons and other elements, basic Javascript and PHP, a lot on WordPress – specially designing themes, and a very important and under represented theme, good SEO on page design, keyword research and landing pages. In my opinion, this is one of the strongest areas in the course.
One interesting thing is that the course is constantly receiving small updates. In SEO, which changes all the time, this is really important.
The only thing I really thing is missing in the course are transcripts from the videos.
If you actually want to become a professional Web Designer you also get many useful lessons on the specifics of the business, such as specialization, handling your clients and business strategies. And I believe the SEO training is invaluable – too many web designers make pages that rank miserably because they don't grasp more than the basics (and sometimes not even them).
Overall, I can really recommend this course for both Web Designers and people with sites that they want to improve.
Check out Ben Hunt's Pro Web Design Course
Update (25/June/2013): All videos from Websiteworks.tv were added to the course! These are the reason I got on the course in the first place. They consist of SEO, copy and design analysis of sites, and are full of great information and ideas . Some Marketing MasterClass webinars and other were added too. But please note that if you get the monthly version of the course, these are only available after 6 months!