I would like to "get into" web page design or atleast get a feel of how it works. I have both a Win 2k Pro pc and an iMac running OS X. What should I read and buy to get started? Thanks all.
Web Page Design Suggestions
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I recently got the book How to do everything with HTML. It teaches web site design the best way; that is, the manual way. Just get a good text editor (I prefer UltraEdit, but notepad works fine too) and start typing up your HTML. 
Amen. Dreamweaver and Adobe GoLive are the two big WYSIWYG editors we use around here and ColdFusion Studio is what the programmers lean toward (even our former ASP programmer liked CF Studio.) Once you learn the basic HTML source code doing it the old fashioned way in text editors really is a waster of time IMO. It takes longer (time is money if you're doing it for a living) and if you're managing large sites where changes have to be made across dozens (or hundreds of pages) it's a complete pain.
EDIT: Actually, since you're just starting out I guess learning the old-fashioned way might be the best option if for no other reason than $$$. Dreamweaver and GoLive are both rather expensive programs, although I highly recommend them if you ever get serious into web site work. For books, anything by the O'Reilly company is generally very good.
check out Webmonkey.com and Computerart.co.uk. Thats how i got started. Learn photoshop/any art programs if you're planning to go towards the art of webdesigning. Learn .Net/PHP if you're leaning towards programming
dreamweaver is free if you get it from an "alternate source", i agree, better to learn the basic source then go onto a more advanced wysiwyg editor.
alot of people are all like "i only use notepad, only n00bs use wysiwyg" but it takes them like 3 weeks to get thier table lined up
edit: i suggest getting a "web page for dummies" or a "web design in easy steps" book, as they should contain everything you need to get started
OREOSpeedwagon
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- May 30, 2001
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Originally posted by: bryce
WTF?
It really has a lot less to do with it than you'd think. It's like saying you need to know how to use a skilsaw and pour concrete to be an architect.
OREOSpeedwagon
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- May 30, 2001
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Originally posted by: notfred
Originally posted by: bryce
WTF?
It really has a lot less to do with it than you'd think. It's like saying you need to know how to use a skilsaw and pour concrete to be an architect.
But normally today, unless it's a big company, one person designs and builds the site themselves for a personal site or some small business sites, unlike an architect who designs and construction company that builds. I wouldn't say that HTML has nothing to do with web design though, even though I used little of it for my personal site.
edit: grammar
Bryce,
What did you use to design your website and would you say it is complex or simple?
What if I was interested in linking up my website to a (small) database?
What did you use to design your website and would you say it is complex or simple?
What if I was interested in linking up my website to a (small) database?
OREOSpeedwagon
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- May 30, 2001
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I wrote my site from scratch and it's mostly in PHP. I wouldn't say that it's really complex, but it's not really simple either. BTW, I'm the wrong person to be asking about databases, but I know that some of the other people here would be helpful.
PHP is just like ASP and ColdFusion (AFAIK); it is for your backend. It has nothing to do with how the browser displays the page on the screen; all PHP does is pull the relevant information from a database and (possibly) apply (X)HTML and CSS to it before sending it to the browser. Thus, as far as an internet browser is concerned, your site is only in (X)HTML and CSS, because the browser never sees any PHP.
Authenticate, I have very little knowledge of the syntax of the PHP language, but if you'd like to learn you might want to check out the Authoring section of the Web Developer's Virtual Library. That is the place where I'm learning a lot of stuff that goes into the making of this template (edit: IE 6 or Mozilla 1.x or Opera 6.x is needed, pretty much anything less will screw up the rendering
isgust for my personal site.
radioouman
Diamond Member
- Nov 4, 2002
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Learn some good old HTML first, just so you have an idea of what's going on. Then you'll be able to see how crappy the code is that comes from the editors. Frontpage usually makes web pages that are at least 3 times larger than they need to be... That makes a difference when your web hosting company watches the amount of data sent per month...
Yea, Frontpage royally sucks, that's why I only use it when I absolutely have to (for bigger stuff that needs navigation management and the only option on the server is the FP extensions). I prefer to hand code small stuff, and am going to check out Dreamweaver soon, since lots of people seem to like that one.
PHP is really good at working with databases, especially MySQL. If you want to run a PHP front end with a MySQL backend it can be really efficient at controlling content. I designed a site with no HTML or PHP content, everything was driven through MySQL which made it a snap to update or change pages.
If you do go that route phpMyAdmin is your friend.[
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