website design, template and creativity

[Brother Michael]

hey all,

I am just breaking into the world of web design and as such I am playing around with Dreamweaver. I am making a website for a small online forum community for a hobby that I enjoy.

I want to create something that is visually appealing but not cluttered.

How would I create something like this? I really like that layout of rounded boxes with text. How do I go about making that? Is that a pre-made template?

Which brings me to another issue: Templates. What are they? How can I create them? I have seen a lot of websites that sell templates. That seems to me to be a bit silly. Why would you want to buy a site that looks like everyone elses? I mean I can understand that sites done by the smae group or person are going to have a similiariteis but why would you want to have the EXACT layout of someone else?

Little confused, but willing to learn.

Mike

 

[maya]

I would say those are made in PS.

As many templates look rotten as they stand on they own.

You will need to learn the inner working of web design and PS will help to make it look good to some length.

 

[Brother Michael]

Ok I am still a little confused. So how about this...what book should I look into getting?

And if the boxes were made in photoshop and are images, how does one put text on them????

Mike

EDIT: Also thanks for the quick reply

 

[maya]

Ok I am still a little confused. So how about this...what book should I look into getting?

And if the boxes were made in photoshop and are images, how does one put text on them????

Mike

EDIT: Also thanks for the quick reply

You can do a forum search here and a google search for all your html needs. There are many good sites to learn html on this forum.

use key words such as "website" "programming" "language" "html".

 

[maya]

Some are Java bases buttons, some are links on the site to place text on top of an image.


Just remember to keep it simple it will look better than to have too much Jazz on the site and have the end user(s) lost trying to find the information they are looking for.


You can look at a classic site layout in my signature link, however I have many coming soon signs since I have to size the videos and so forth.

However you can obtain a nice understanding from it.