Ok basically, I really want to get into web design, but I'm not really sure what the best way is to start. Some say Dreamweaver, some say photoshop, some say html. Basically I would like to know what some of you have found is the best way to begin to learn. What do you learn first and what to follow that with. Anyways your imput would be appreciated.
depending on your age, you might want to take a class on it to get the basics and experiment on your own too. vist html sites. i heard dreamweaver was nice too.
The basics for most people are html, graphics are kind of a side thing. They help, but are not required to know... you can always find people to do those for you. Running a site reuires at least some knowledge of how to code, the more proficient you are... the better your site. Once you feel comfortable with html, which isn't to hard to learn... you should pick up some javascript, xml, css, php, and any other web languages you may feel necessary to learn. If you want a site with server-side scripting for like making a shopping-cart or something like that, you should learn asp also.
i, myself, am taking a class learning java. last year i had a slim explanation of html, so i learned a bit of that. i was thinking about getting a domain and messing around with html so i can see what i can do with it and pick up new stuff.
hmmm yeah so basically you'd recommend getting all your coding down first before really learning a program like dreamweaver?
so use photoshop to create the page... and then code it with html and php? or is it easier to code in dreamweaver? oh and thanks rannek for your article.
Play with photoshop, get to know all of its functions and tools. Thats what i did, now you give me any template and most likely i'll re-create it in no time. Or in the worst case my final outcome will be somewhat close to the original.
First learn how to make a simple template in photoshop then keep practicing till you get better and better then when you're happy with a template , learn how to slice it and save it for the web. Then open any website editor such as Dreamweaver and Microsoft Frontpage and code it or if you haven't yet got the knowledge of these programs either play with tools till you understand it (like i did with photoshop and dreamweaver) and just carry on getting better.
well I started out with one of them groups.msn.com sites and kept looking at the code to see what did what and eventually learned html then got into photoshop, then I got here lol, now im learning php, but yea i'd say that it was an easy learn.
aighty thanks for all of the advice... I think i'll mess around with creating templates and such in photoshop as alot of you have suggested. after that then i guess I can learn all of the coding aspect.
Yeah, thats great advice to someone who is just starting web design. Djeez... To start off with web design, you must learn HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language). This is basically a set of instructions sent to your browser on how to display a web page. A simple HTML page would look like this: Code: <html> <head> <title>Test Page</title> </head> <body> [b]This is a test page[/b] </body> <html> Copy/Paste that into Notepad, save to your Desktop as index.htm and run in your preferred browser - Thats a simple HTML page The best way to go about learning this (in my opinion) is to visit the HTML section on www.w3schools.com, where it is easily explained and very clear. Macromedia Dreamweaver is an excellent application for coding websites, including HTML, as it uses syntax highlighting and other features to make your code simple and readable. I strongly recommend *aquiring* it to help you. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are another set of instructions beside your HTML page which defines styles for your site, but this isnt important to learn at first as a lot of the CSS code can be defined in HTML. Many websites that are graphically intense (For example, the ones posted in the 'Website Templates' forum) are designed firstly in Adobe Photoshop which is worth playing around with if thats the route you want to go down. Firstly, you would design the entire site as you would like it to finish up as in Photoshop, before slicing it up into lots of sections and finally putting it back together as HTML in Dreamweaver (or similiar). To assist you, I recommend www.good-tutorials.com for thousands of Adobe Photoshop tutorials and also www.pixel2life.com which has tutorials for Photoshop, Dreamweaver, HTML, CSS etc etc. Hope that made sense and gives you something to start with -LemoNade-
