You should have good coding knowledge of HTML, CSS and JAVA Script to design good static template.. you can learn online from http://www.w3schools.com/ and can use gooogle search.. also try to learn WYSWYG editors such as Dreamweaver.. if want to build dynamic sites try learning PHP
well guys, i already know javascript/css/html/photoshop/3d Studio max/autocad ... but don't know how to combine them to do something like : http://www.free-lance.ru/users/nid/
i never like ebook if focusing on web design. you have to find inspiration and if you wanna learn, you might want to try sites like good-tutorials.com to get started with. hope this helps
Becoming a web designer requires two things. 1. knowledge of tools like html, photoshop, dreamweaver, fireworks, css etc which you have. 2. Being creative in designing layouts, that is must. It requires a vision on various web layouts like what colors, how they should look like, what styles or curves, where to apply and so on. You can build you vision if you wish by visiting template sites like templatemonster.com or flashkit.com. That will give you an idea, how professional websites are designed. then you may start doing it for one or more websites, you can get good quality photos from gettyimages.com or istockphoto.com, veer.com. So in short learn tools, build creativity, start working on some layout (probably your own person website) and use images from above sites. If you want some fantastic java scripts, you can take help at dynamicdrive.com. I hope it helps.
what ive learned is, practice makes perfect. Find a very simple site you like, and try to recreate it. I started in M$ frontpage, then slowly moved over to the code view with doing small edits. Now i have been coding everything in notepad and doing just fine. this is also a great help, www. w3schools .com/
Nothing is hard but practice makes men/women perfect. Also creativity and desire to design astonishing web pages is must. If you are a programmer and doing it since long, I think you should not take a diversion, You can still learn Photoshop and some designing stuff so you can help yourself if no designer is around.
You say you know HTML and CSS, but to make things like templates you should be ROCK-STEADY in your CSS for positioning. I really, really benefitted from this book: HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS by Rachel Andrew and Dan Shafer. Without a good basis for positioning things, your HTML ends up being written without ideas on what other people can do with it (using CSS to position). For instance, having a sidebar, you can set that first in HTML and let people either have it positioned to the right or the left using float. However, if the sidebar came AFTER the content/main box in the HTML, then there's a third possibility: a fat footer, as well as still a normal sidebar (using the negative-margin wrapping-float trick). If you use this will will also need a wrapper or container of some kind who can be 100% width (or damn near, I've done it with something 90% wide) and floated (usually left). That technique isn't in the book, but I would never had been able to understand it when deathshadow and Dan Schulz first posted it (and it's at LayoutGala too) without that book to set things firm in my mind. There's also not enough talk of bugs and clearing, but oh well-- again, it's a basis. Second thing is that templates are bloated steaming piles of code by their nature : ) You end up writing various versions of the same HTML page using different stylesheets for each version. This is something like CSS Zen Garden where the same HTML is used to make a bazillion different types of design... so you'll see, the HTML for the Zen Garden is bloated as hell-- lots of "sandbags" where people can add images and classes and ids on almost everything. This bloat is necessary to maintain flexibility, which is of course needed in a template. You'll need to think of how people will add their own logos, and where they can stick the text for the logo (so if they stick it in the HTML, they'll use ALT text, but if it's a CSS background image, then you'll need to give them access to the background-holding element AND the parent element, so they can add appropriate text).
Another great site for learning html is htmldog.com Like suggested above you will only learn and get better with practice, try to replacate something and then check that you got the desired outcome and then look at the code to make sure it is also valid.
What helped me out most in the start was buying a book from my local bookstore that looked good. It combined HTML, CSS, and XHTML. They are the basics and after that you can expand your knowledge to PHP and other languages to make some really complex websites. I also suggest getting familiar with a graphics environment and messing around so you can become skilled at making graphics for your site.