Website design

[Gun Barrel Straight]

Not sure if this is the right area to post this thread, so mods, move if necessary.

I just wanted to ask about website designing. I have been interested in following up on an idea for a while but never got around to it, but now that my interest is still there i thought i may as well act out on it.

Trouble is i have no experience what-so-ever in website designing. What's it like for complete beginners? Where do you start? I thought about taking a correspondence course to get me going, but they are far, far too expensive.

Any info appreciated.

 

[VanBerlo=God]

don't bother with any internet related courses, as they are a complete waste of time and money, and on top of that, you can learn all the skills you need with time.

1. start easy - learn html
2. move to basic scripting - learn javascript & xml
3. move onto intermediate scripting - learn intermediate javascript techniques (object orientated approach) and php/.net/asp/cold fusion etc.

When I say start easy, i'm not talking design the AFL website.
There are several key aspects about web design that you must learn - and these are assuming u just want to design layouts and graphics, and some interaction, not code the entire website from scratch.

1. Learn HTML. You need to learn the most recent acceptable standards (transition & strict), and learn how to implement these standards into your web pages.
2. Learn CSS. This is critical to proper page flow and setout. There are problems with IE, and any designer worth a damn will tell you they design for firefox, and make concessions for IE later.
3. Learn javascript. This isn't totally critical, but you can add a damned lot of functionality to your webpage, like live searching, buttons, floating divs, and much more.

If you would like some more info, I can setup a resource list and some tutorials on my website, and I will link it - make sure you email me @ justinmitchell AT iinet dot net dot au

 

[Parabola]

Or, if you just want a blog and not have to worry about any of it. check out wordpress or blogger.
I designed my main site myself (ParableVisions.com) but it took me a good few years before I started to design the way I wanted to. It was hell until then.
I use Wordpress for my alter site (ParableVisions.wordpress.com)
For this site I just wanted to put together an easy blog and not worry about the hosting or design. So I can just concentrate on the content.

 

[Funkalicous]

You could also buy some books too. That's half of how I learnt.

 

[VanBerlo=God]

You could also buy some books too. That's half of how I learnt.

or download e-books.
books are good for 1 thing only - knowing the full text of a command. they are author based, so you usually get a lot of useless bullcrap inbetween the useful stuff.

 

[Conan Troutman]

Not sure if this is the right area to post this thread, so mods, move if necessary.

I just wanted to ask about website designing. I have been interested in following up on an idea for a while but never got around to it, but now that my interest is still there i thought i may as well act out on it.

Trouble is i have no experience what-so-ever in website designing. What's it like for complete beginners? Where do you start? I thought about taking a correspondence course to get me going, but they are far, far too expensive.

Any info appreciated.

Added to the above, you might want to learn the 'design' part of website design for stuff like the navigation, layout, typography, graphic design, photography, illustration, multimedia etc.

Also I'd recommend trying programs like Dreamweaver which write code for you, so that way you can see what the code does without having to write it. Although there's a learning curve in learning Dreamweaver in the first place - might be easier to get your head around though if you're not familiar with programming at all. For example, if you link one page to another (which in dreamweaver you browse for the file to link to - or drag an icon to the file), you'll then see what code you need to write to create that link.

Try to find tutorials online to help you out - there's usually tutorials for everything. Also looking at the code to see how other basic html sites are made (once you know a little bit) is helpful I've found. Sites like w3schools.com and alistapart.com are useful for finding bits of code or tutorials where you can learn bit and pieces from them. A list apart is good because they talk about the visual design side of things too. I don't know if they'd be much use at the very beginning though.

Like VanBerlo=God said, learn html but start easy. I reckon if you can get your head around how it works, then something like dreamweaver helps with working out how to do different things with it, and keep going from there - just don't let dreamweaver do all the work without learning what it's doing . There's trial versions of dreamweaver, and cracks/patches around

A webdesign for dummies type book might be worth looking at for the very beginning. Personally I find getting my head around how something works the hardest part with self-teaching, but once that clicks, it's just a matter of learning how to do what I need to get my ideas working (if that makes sense?? ). That's where a book would be useful I reckon, getting your head around it at the start - just make sure it's one especially for beginners - some of those types of books can be pretty confusing.

 

[Gun Barrel Straight]

Cheers for the advice all!

Definately taking this on board.

 

[VanBerlo=God]

i can give you 100 tips of proper web design
or near 100, just email me.
my address is in my profile, and its in the first response.

 

[Funkalicous]

or download e-books.
books are good for 1 thing only - knowing the full text of a command. they are author based, so you usually get a lot of useless bullcrap inbetween the useful stuff.

I don't think so... The people that normally write those books are very experienced programmers, and that "useless crap" whilst may not be important at the time, it often explains why certain code doesn't work at certain times. All said, it's good knowledge to have. If it's just syntax you're after, online stuff like php.net is as good as anything.

 

[VanBerlo=God]

those books aren't that great tho.
when i was learning java, i was learning through a text book based on this authors way of doing stuff. he included this package for reading input through the keyboard, so all in all, i never really learnt how to do proper keyboard input until i researched it on java.

thats the problem with a lot of books - they a lot don't get proof read, and have a lot of missleading and incorrect information within.
If you want to learn how stuff works, then trial and error and trying new stuff is the best way to go.

oveall a html page should look like this

My first HTML Page:
<html>
<head><title>my page</title>
<meta>
</head>
<body>
<p>this is a paragraph!
<br/>this is a new line
<a href="#">this is a link pointing to no where!</a>
<br/><a href="http://www.google.com">this is a link pointing to google!</a>
</body>
</html>

give it a run and see how it looks.

 

[Chief]

or download e-books.
books are good for 1 thing only - knowing the full text of a command. they are author based, so you usually get a lot of useless bullcrap inbetween the useful stuff.

Ignoring the theory and opinion leads to a one-dimensional-hacker style. Picking up multiple books and adding in a lot of experimentation is a far better way. I learned HTML in about 1997 using one book and I use the web as a reference.

I understand if you had a bad experience with a book, that doesn't mean all books are useless. Eric Meyer on CSS is a fantastic book. Zeldman on standards based design - great. Nielsen, Norman or Papanek on usability and design. Cloninger's Fresh Styles is a good reference and still relevant today.

Books show you what is possible and ways to do it. Your experimentation will show you the way that is best for you.

 

[beaumont911]

those books aren't that great tho.
when i was learning java, i was learning through a text book based on this authors way of doing stuff. he included this package for reading input through the keyboard, so all in all, i never really learnt how to do proper keyboard input until i researched it on java.

It all depends on the book then. When I learnt Java last year at uni, I used the book and it explained everything very well and it was easy to understand.

I suppose it depends on the book itself, but my Java book was great and when I started to learn C++ last year that book too was very good.

 

[VanBerlo=God]

Ignoring the theory and opinion leads to a one-dimensional-hacker style. Picking up multiple books and adding in a lot of experimentation is a far better way. I learned HTML in about 1997 using one book and I use the web as a reference.

I understand if you had a bad experience with a book, that doesn't mean all books are useless. Eric Meyer on CSS is a fantastic book. Zeldman on standards based design - great. Nielsen, Norman or Papanek on usability and design. Cloninger's Fresh Styles is a good reference and still relevant today.

Books show you what is possible and ways to do it. Your experimentation will show you the way that is best for you.

its not just 1 book, its about every single text or reference book I have read has been full of donkey poop.

It has 'you can do this this n this' for really basic stuff, but say if you need to implement something more advanced, they generally don't have any reference or help for it.
the best reference you can possibly get is off the internet.

w3 schools, and for web pages that you like - save the source and figure out how it all works that is the main way I learnt for all web technologies.

i do agree with the variation in text books, different styles so you get different ideas, but the problems associated with them isn't in my opinion, worth the risk of actually reading them. you have the contrasting styles, but each style has pro's and con's that render it useful or useless.
like tabbing for instance, is it really useful in html? because when you look at the heirachy, you can ultimately have up to 30 objects encapsulated at once within the <html> tags.
also some authors have bad ways of doing stuff, and beginners won't pick up on it until later on when they realise they have learn't everything back to front or in an extremely inefficient manner.

some can say that wouldn't really apply to html, but it does - it applies to every language scripting, high/low level, machine coding languages etc.

my biggest gripe with these so called authors (not the ones you have listed as they are well known, but the lesser known) is their lack in consistency throughout the text book in the level of description, or the depth of coding that they have. for instance in one java book the author may give as detailed explanation of variables that one can possibly give, then in the next section give the most piss weak explanation of what an array is, and leave the reader sitting there thinking 'so i shouldn't use arrays?'.

they're both good and bad, take the bad with the good unfortunately, and usually at $100 per book, its not worth it for students who are mostly poor.