web design for beginners. advice wanted

[emt8q5]

I am a college student trying to teach myself website design. Two friends of the family own small businesses and have told me they would pay me to build and maintain their sites. Both would be business sites; however neither would need to be an e-commerce site with a shopping cart or anything. Just a demonstration of available products and services.

Currently, I understand the basics of HTML and XHTML. I?ve never built a website myself, however I understand how to do it in principal.

Basically, I?m curious how to go about learning the basics of professional website design. I?ve been tinkering with Frontpage 2003, and plan to use this as my design tool.

In order to build a website which looks professional, I need to be familiar with more than just XHTML. I?m looking to familiarize myself with the necessary elements of web design.

First of all, I am clueless when it comes to web graphic creation- I currently am looking into paint shop pro 9, primarily because it is $400 less than Photoshop CS, but also because I?ve heard that it provides everything necessary to do what I would require and has less of a learning curve than photoshop. I?ve downloaded the 60 day trial of PSP 9, however I?m having trouble finding good learning guides to using it. I learned HTML and Frontpage with ?Sam?s teach yourself? guides and found them very easy to use. I can?t find any guides for PSP 9, guess its too new of a product.

Aside from that, I?m not even sure what else to look into as far as technology goes. I see all kinds of lingo such as SQL, Java, and Flash and am quite clueless as to what they do. My semeseter is almost over and I will have a large amount of free time on my hands which I would like to devote to really getting a foot in the door as far as web design goes.

I know that many professionals frequent these boards and I have always got excellent help from these boards. As always, any help, comments, or advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

[kamper]

1. http://www.w3schools.com
2. practice your xhtml, make a few pages, try to emulate what you see on the web
3. learn css
4. ditch Frontpage
5. become a programmer before worrying about things like sql and java, they are for highly dynamic web applications

 

[Achilles97]

If you will be using a program to build the site, I suggest Dreamweaver with Fireworks. Also pick up a book on cascading style sheets.

If you want to add scripting to your sites, I highly suggest learning PHP. There's only so much you can do with a flat, non-active webpage, eventually you'll want to add dynamic content to it, and PHP is the way to go (in my opinion).

Good luck.

 

[emt8q5]

why do you recommend dropping frontpage? It seems like it takes care of all the basics for you, saving you time for font, color, spacing, frames, etc? I remember reading somewhere that most professional sites are built using a WYSIWYG program?

 

[kmac1914]

Frontpage is cool and all, but to be honest, it seems to me at least that dreamweaver gives you the most room to grow as you get better at making pages. Plus, it allows you to do so much more.

But then again, I'm only a lil farther along than you.

 

[stndn]

why frontpage is bad ,)

actually, back in the days of netscape vs msie, the best way of learning HTML was to look at web pages, view the source code, copy/paste/edit it, and then view it and see the results.

nowadays, WYSIWYG editors seem to be the way to go.
but for me, i prefer regular text editor to the wysiwyg editors.

kamper has it right, except i would put point #4 as point #1.
if you should get wysiwyg editors, i suggest dreamweaver (not free) or nvu

so, i'd say:
1. get better wysiwyg editor (optional: text editor with or without syntax highlighting)
2. learn xhtml
3. learn css
4. get image editor
5. learn graphic design
6. put xhtml + css + graphic
7. expand on them (eg: add dynamic, database-driven website, etc).

all the while, check out suggestions and ideas and forums to see how you can improve on your web development skills.

for sample great pages, i suggest open source web design

 

[screw3d]

Yep.. for ultimate control over web pages, no WYSIWIG editor can rival a regular text editor, especially when CSS comes into play. I only use WYSYWIG to mark up bare content and use CSS to style everything else.

Edit: And oh, get rid of frontpage. It probably spits out the worst code among all WYSIWIG editors. :|

 

[Czar]

working with frontpage feels like you are working with a word document

get dreamweaver, if anything, but I recomend just doing it by hand if you really want to learn everything about it

 

[Modeps]

While Dreamweaver and other WYSIWYG editors are 'easy' to use, it's very important to actually understand what you're doing with the code. I use Dreamweaver only because it's faster than typing the code myself.

 

[Maverick2002]

I'm a Digital Design major in school (starting 3rd year) and here's what I recommend:

Don't use FrontPage. It adds a ton of useless, incompatible, unnecessary code to your website by default. For web design, if you use purely a WYSIWYG editor you won't get far.

You need to learn HTML. Code a website in Notepad. Once you know the basics, it's really not that difficult.

Get a good HTML editor. I recommend Dreamweaver MX or later. It's a very powerful application which follows standards more than any other editor I know of (besides hand coding it in Notepad of course). It has color-coding which is EXTREMELY helpful when debugging and/or using hybrid code (such as PHP with HTML). It also has a split editing mode, which shows you both the code and the actual output in real time.

Get an image editing program. If you're just starting out, there are a bunch of free utilities. Beyond that, I would recommend Photoshop. Don't waste your money on CS; I use CS at work (for several months now) and there's really nothing terribly amazing about it. If you can score Photoshop 7 (what I use at home) for a few hundred less, you'll find it to be just as good.

Learn CSS. http://w3schools.com is a great website.

Search online for tutorials in HTML, Photoshop, and CSS.

Learning some basic Javascript is a good idea (i.e. figuring out how existing scripts work); same goes for PHP. This is all secondary though.

Don't bother with Flash right now. Flash basics aren't too bad, but more advanced use has a moderate-steep learning curve. Besides, almost everything made in Flash can be reproduced through a combination of CSS, Javascript, and DHTML.

Good luck!

 

[torpid]

What kind of businesses are these? How many products do they have?

You can certainly design a site using notepad and/or dreamweaver, but many businesses would do well to have certain features that will require more than simple html knowledge.

 

[notfred]

Design, whether for the web, for the interior of your house, for printed material, or for anything else, has very very little to do with technical skills. Design is an art, and knowing how to build a web page will not be any more helpful in building an effective website than knowing how to operate a paintbrush will be effective in painting a beautiful painting. Yes, the technical aspect si required to complete the work, but it's almost inconsequential from a design perspective.

 

[austin316]

I second dreamweaver and especially fireworks. If you are eventually going to be using a database for dynamic content, visual studio 2005 for wed development is available for download.





Question: can the .aspx files made using visual studio be uploaded and used on ripplehost?

 

[chowmein]

webmonkey, or just page source and self-teach yourself.

 

[Bulldog13]

Great thread. Was wondering the same stuff as the OP.

 

[yoda291]

Originally posted by: notfred
Design, whether for the web, for the interior of your house, for printed material, or for anything else, has very very little to do with technical skills. Design is an art, and knowing how to build a web page will not be any more helpful in building an effective website than knowing how to operate a paintbrush will be effective in painting a beautiful painting. Yes, the technical aspect si required to complete the work, but it's almost inconsequential from a design perspective.

Seconded.

Web layouts look a lot like page layouts for a reason.
Goto the library, walk to the arts section and check out books on Color theory, publishing, layouts, architecture, and interior design. Then find books on effective advertising and marketing. If you can find it, "homepage useability" is a good book to start. Big pictures, easy to read.