I'm loving the layout of this website: emptees.com It's sleek, fast, and looks great. I believe it's a fully customized website. Can anyone tell me what their using as the backend? I believe it's ruby on rails, but I'm not sure. Anywa how would I go about making my own version of this website for another niche that has nothing to do with t-shirts? I'm a total newbie when it comes to web design & programming. I know basic html, and some css. So I have a lot to learn I'm sure. What programming languages do I need to learn to make a website like that? and where should I begin. Thanks for any help!
That whole website is powered by http://bigcartel.com/ - They have pricing anywhere from $0/month to $20/month. So you can have all the functionality of that site and you don't have to learn anything.
Actually it's a seperate site designed by the same team that designed bigcartel.com The two-man team is: indielabs.com The customized stores that bigcartel make aren't the same as emptees.com!
OK, I just saw that the site was running on bigcartel so I assumed it was their package. To make a site like that, though, you'd need a designer who's really good, and a very good programmer also to handle all the coding. Honestly, if you're just learning, and you're not a professional graphic designer and you don't even know PHP yet, it's going to be a couple years before you could put together something that looked that professional.
Umm...all the pictures on there are made by the users who design tshirts. The site is for designers to share their t-shirt designs so that's why it looks very graphic intensive. There is no graphics that are made by the website team on there! It's all coding and css. Also their not using PHP, it's Ruby on Rails! So I guess that's what I need to focus on learning. Thanks anyway for your input.
LOL, sure, there's no design there at all. Learn HTML and CSS and come back in a year and we'll see where you are. To an inexperienced designer, it may look like a simple site. But designing a minimalist site which really looks good and has a great interface like that is a lot harder than you think. But it's certainly a good place for a beginner to start. To begin with, you'll certainly need an understanding of HTML and CSS, so it's good you're starting there. Next move out to the more advanced work, which is designing the site architecture and the database design. You'll need to read up on Database Normalization when you design the table structures. Then research PHP, how it connects to databases, etc., and how to use PHP code to extract data from databases. Then you've got to begin coding the pages and functions. You'll need things like user signup functions, user favorites, the ability for users to upload files, the ability to post comments, etc. There's a lot going on in this site for a newbie programmer, and it's going to keep you busy for a long time.