Help.. Newbie interested in learning Web Design

Hi Everyone,

I have been outsourcing my designs for quite some time, now I'm interested in learning web design myself so i can start doing designs. Does anyone have any suggestions as to recommended web design tools and or resources for making it an easier task?

What would you recommend be a good starter?

Thanx

 

try www.w3schools.com, when you advance with your HTML and CSS knowledge, I believe they have JavaScript too.. check out www.dynamicdrive.com.. and if you need any help feel free to pm me

 

w3schools as already suggested, but also just mess around and create a lot of pages for practice which will make things easier in the long run.

 

Thank you very much!

 

Any input on dreamweaver... is this a good starter web design software or is it for the more experienced designers?

 

If you're going to use dreamweaver, just use it for the syntax highlight and not the wysiwyg.. getting into using a wysiwyg is a bad habit and the markup almost never validates.. I personally use dreamweaver and it's quite helpful.. just make sure you hand code your work if you want it done right and professionally

 

Thank you, ill keep that in mind.

 

I believe I got a good answer for this one...it's same way I learned basic web design...ok here it goes:

I found one day I could get a free blog on Blogger and modify the design as I like.Of course,I knew nothing about web design so I sought help,but saw the answers were taking forever.Then I decided to go into my blogs template to see which 'lines of code' performed certain actions on my website.I simply deleted certain lines and clicked 'preview' to see the difference...I Googled 'free html codes' and came across all kinds of free sites giving the modifications I needed... before you know it I was doing modifications that some people were paying hundreds of bucks for. I later got 'real' sites with actual cpanel-type stuff and did the same type of experiments learning more about php,css,etc.

My point is you can get your ownself started just as I did.This is good especially if you don't have the big bucks to shell out in the beginning.

 

when you say web design do you mean the graphics part or the coding part?

 

To entrabnetworks:
Design is not only coding, as you may already know. As FunkyFresh said, there is also the graphic part. I would dare say that these are two separate specialties, so I would talk about website design and website building. With respect to the latter, the orthodox way to go is to learn HTML and CSS, later JavaScript and PHP. If you know the theory, the tool that you use is just a matter of personal taste.
Of course, you may follow the adventurous way proposed by infopage. It makes everything funnier, but it also takes more time.

 

This is actually the exact way i learned the basics.

Sorry for the confusion... I mean the Graffics part, as per coding I am familiar with basics in html, css, java, php, mysql, etc...

Here is an example of what type of web design I can do: PromoJunkie.com

But I would like to learn more about the graffics site so i can create designs like NetworkBarGenerator.com "Templates I guess"

 

I actually personally like dreamweaver. It's how I learned. Basically I would let it do a lot of stuff for me and then I would look at the code it added and learn how to do it myself. But I always work much better with a visual program then notepad for instance.

 

Thanks for the input, i think ill try it out.