New to Web Design

[zyggiepyggie]

Hey

I'm fairly new to web design and I'm looking to be pointed in the right direction.

I've made a couple of websites before, some hosted and some just for the crack of it. Mainly using HTML/CSS and spliced images (nothing complicated, think block colors and basic navigation - tables and the odd iframe).

I understand the basics of web design but am looking to progress further. I just don't know which direction to continue in. I've seen the stickys for beginners but there is a LOT of information in them.

I want to start creating more complex websites, incorporating scripts and feeds from other sites etc. Would it be best to start learning a web programming language? Or to start creating more aesthetically pleasing pages first?

Thanks.

 

[angelwatt]

You can do both. It also depends on your strong points; design vs development. If you like development then PHP would be good to learn, plus any of the frameworks associated with them like Zend and Kohana. Also look at CMS, both in terms of using them, and potentially extending them. WordPress allows you a lot of flexibility so you can attack both the design of the page and get into the development of templates as well so there's a lot of room to increase your skill set.

 

[zyggiepyggie]

You can do both. It also depends on your strong points; design vs development. If you like development then PHP would be good to learn, plus any of the frameworks associated with them like Zend and Kohana. Also look at CMS, both in terms of using them, and potentially extending them. WordPress allows you a lot of flexibility so you can attack both the design of the page and get into the development of templates as well so there's a lot of room to increase your skill set.

Thanks, I really appreciate your advise. I've just been looking at WebPress - it looks pretty impressive I'm going to give it a try. I have also been considering learning PHP which I think could only be beneficial?

 

[angelwatt]

Thanks, I really appreciate your advise. I've just been looking at WebPress - it looks pretty impressive I'm going to give it a try. I have also been considering learning PHP which I think could only be beneficial?

Yea, I mentioned PHP in my post along with PHP frameworks that can help you do more development with less code. PHP is nice because you can start with small snippets of code to do little tasks, similar to the way you can use JavaScript on a page. Other languages require you to put more code up to get things even started.

When I started with PHP I was doing very simple things like using the include function to bring in a common navigation, header, and footer onto every page so it only needed to be edited in one file. I slowly built up the skills and do file reading/writing and working with databases, which really evolve what you can do on a site. Essentially, I'm saying you can gradually build up your skill in PHP while also using it productively along the way in a meaningful manner.

 

[Dana Beck]

Hey

I'm fairly new to web design and I'm looking to be pointed in the right direction.

I've made a couple of websites before, some hosted and some just for the crack of it. Mainly using HTML/CSS and spliced images (nothing complicated, think block colors and basic navigation - tables and the odd iframe).

I understand the basics of web design but am looking to progress further. I just don't know which direction to continue in. I've seen the stickys for beginners but there is a LOT of information in them.

I want to start creating more complex websites, incorporating scripts and feeds from other sites etc. Would it be best to start learning a web programming language? Or to start creating more aesthetically pleasing pages first?

Thanks.

At Photoshop World last month Janine Warner showed us a tutorial--very simple as she went through it--for using a MAMP server on your Mac to create and manage a WordPress blog through Dreamweaver. If you use DW, it was really pretty straightforward. The tutorial steps are here. Should be a good approach to branch out from static sites to database, php, and using your own machine as a testing server.

 

[Tanto]

If you're learning web design, I think that you should be focusing your efforts on learning JavaScript and CSS because that's where the future of web design is going to as Flash starts to fade out. That's the core of websites these days and learning JS will translate into making learning server-side programming like PHP much easier.