Beginner to web design. Need advice Please!!

[mikepg]

Ok, I have had some web design in college (I have a BSBA in MIS). I am not very artistic or creative (graphically). I am more geared towards the technical side of computers. That being said, here is what I am looking for help in.

I have a lot of ideas that I would like to put on the web (from business ideas, to forums and some informational sites). I would like to be able to host my own pages on my PC(s) since I have 4 that are plenty fast to be servers. The slowest I believe is a P4 2.8 (all with 2gb ram).

My probelm is getting the pages up and running. I think it is because I have never done it before, I am somewhat scared. I have done VB and cobol programming before, but very little HTML, Java or anything else web related.

I am looking for either a good book on the subject of creating web pages or a few tutorials to look over.

Also, what program woudl you reccommend using to created the pages? I have FP 2003, but I know a lot of people hate FP. Once I know and understand how code works, I am very good at working with source.

The site that I would like to work on the most is a business site. Somewhat like Newegg.com or Amazon.com. It is a direct marketing site where I will need to integrate manufacturer's dabtabases (of product info) into a working DB for my site. The info from the manufacturer's DB will be updated daily, so I will have to update my DB that runs my website daily as well. So I guess that my site must be able to be dynamic (change with the DB info)

Anyway, before I go on any farther, I am open to ideas here on where to start and what to do.

Thank you for your time and help!!

Also, I would really like to start a few sites with my own forums. What is involved in this?

 

[Mateja]

Hi,

I'm not exactly a web design pro but I've played around with it on and off for nearly 5 years now so I might be able to point you in the right direction.

As with most things, it's probably best that you take one of your ideas (preferably an informational site rather than a forum or a commercial site) to start with and play about with it and learn along the way. There are more than enough forums and tutorials on the internet that can help you out with any problems you come across, meaning you don't really have to buy any books in my opinion. I would recommend http://www.sitepoint.com for tutorials, advice etc., they have a great memberbase of web designers although the members of this forum seem very knowledgeable also.

I also stumbled upon http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/ recently which could come in handy for you.

I am one of the many people that despise Front Page, though I haven't touched it since 2001 so it might be a bit better now! If you can afford it, Macromedia Dreamweaver is the best out there, but there are many free ones out there too so don't be too eager to splash out on Dreamweaver. I taught myself on notepad, and I believe quite a few others have done the same so that is my recommendation.

As for starting up forums, it can be quite easy depending on which product you use and how much you want to customise the forums, obviously most forums run on PHP nowadays so that's just another language you will have to learn on top of HTML.

Good luck with getting into the game, I'm sure you'll be fine if you persevere.

Oh and HTML is so much easier than VB.

 

[GiddyUp]

I also just delved into web design and the first thing I did was went to my local library and picked up every book I could find on HTML, PHP, MySQL,etc. and web design in general. Just reading through all of them gives you a working knowledge, while the rest is pretty much trial and error. There are a ton of free tutorials on the web and also some cool free software...instead of FP i got a program called Eversoft First Page (free download on the net, just google it)- I'm no expert, but it's working fine for me. From what I understand, its basically a shortcut to writing and implementing html for you so that you don't need to write everything by hand in a simple application such as WordPad. Hope this helps and GL

 

[a7xrjw]

http://pixel2life.com

Just read a lot of tutorials and you will learn, I find them better then the big books that you buy.

 

[JYM]

I first learned how to web design by deconstructing templates, then slowly figuring out how to make my own. All you need to do is find a way that fits you.

As for hosting your site on your own computers, it's not the computer speed that matters but rather your internet speed. Often the bottleneck is the DSL/cable upload speed rather than how fast your CPU is. It's probably better to just pay for a host.

 

[tmax]

I am a full-time web developer. I use DreamWeaver 12 hours a day.
(8 hours at work, 4 hours for fun at home)

Usually, you are NOT allowed to host website with your home internet line. Get a good host. Don't even think about spending less than $10/mo on your host. (saves headache that way).

Play with PHPBB, SMF, etc... keep playing with them.
The only way to advance is to invest time (time, time, & more time...).
Live up to your name, "Computer Geek".
Don't do anything but playing with your computer. It's incredibly fun anyway.
Good luck my friend.

 

[SKETCHi]

For tutorials on web languages, your best bet is to head over to www.w3schools.com. They have tutorials for pretty much all web languages. I suggest you learn HTML, CSS and PHP.

Programs I would recommend are first Adobe GoLive and second Macromedia (Adobe now...) Dreamweaver.

SMF (http://www.simplemachines.org/) is great free forum software, I recommend it over phpBB or any other free option. If you are going to pay for forum software, I would go with vB (http://www.vbulletin.com/) or IPB (http://www.invisionpower.com/ip.dynamic/products/board/index.html).

For designing, Photoshop or Fireworks. I have been using Photoshop for a long time now and it fits all of my needs. You can also get Adobe's suite which has Photoshop and GoLive along with several other great programs bundled.

 

[LeetPCUser]

I would recommend starting off learning the coding. A lot of people would say learn Macromedia Dreamweaver. You, however, have done programming before. I would recommend a website like w3 schools to start learning basic HTML. You can also go to the nearest book store and browse threw their HTML books. Most are pretty much the same. Just make sure it is a guide that starts from scratch.

Also, for HTML you don't need anything too huge. You might just want to know the basics and you can pick the rest up from the web.

 

[eBluSky]

If you want the sites to be anywhere near serious, you have got to have a helping hand in cases of problems. It's fairly simple thing to make it automatically in DreamWeaver (like suggested above) and similar programs, thing gets more complicated to maintain it.

 

[timallard]

learn css and go table less. my site uses no tables timothyallard.com this isnt promotion. just showing you can do with css. if your using firefox, turn off the style sheet and you will be suprised :P

good luck

 

[sedgewickj]

Hi, I'm fairly new to web design. I found a site that helped me quite a bit - it gives some good guidance and acts as a step by step resource (I've almost finished my site, but I think I'll probably refer back to it afterwards as well)..

http://bestwebsite.50webs.com

 

[euk-damien]

These are some Web Design tutorials site, it will help you.

http://www.how-to-build-websites.com/
http://www.entheosweb.com/website_design/default.asp

 

[Jonny]

Hi mikepg, and welcome to an over saturated Industry.
By no means am I trying to scare you away to reduce the competition, I just feel its important that you know what you're getting yourself into. As a lover of all things to do with Computers I think it is great that more and more of the younger generation are trying to catch up with the well established coders, designers and entrepreneurs.

To start off, I suggest you put all of your ideas to one side, write them down research them and then put them on hold. It is no good stepping into an Industry without learning the basics.

The best place to start is with the coding, I find that when I jumped straight into designing you finish a project and then realise "uh oh, what now?". By learning to code before you learn to design you can complete your websites straight after the design stage without needing to go off and learn to code and getting frustrated.

You most definately need to learn HTML, it is the "mother tongue" of the internet. CSS is an up-and-coming new language and it is amazing. Having said that, without knowledge of HTML behind you you could well struggle.
After you have studied HTML then take up CSS, and if it interests you PHP.
I also came from a VB, C++ and Prolog programming background, and I found that PHP caught my attention straight away. PHP is a very powerful programming language for website scripts which will add that extra "something" to your website no matter what it is.

The design side of a website is always the hardest part, but trust me you don't have to be creative (well to a certain point). Start yourself off with some basic theory lessons, if possible take them up at College. For example learn how colours work together, learn how to atract a users attention with well written content and learn the basics of typography. After that it is all up to you what you learn to design with. My preferred piece of software is Adobe Photoshop CS but I also use Adobe Illustrator and Fireworks. However, this software is not free, and please do not try and find it illegally because if they ever discontinue the product due to illegal downloads outweighing purchases, we will all know who to blame .
Flash is great, but should be minimised on websites. Take into account that not all of your visitors will have a connection as fast as yours and they most probably won't wait around and watch it load.

Content writing is possibly the hardest part of creating a website, basic English simply won't do as it doesn't "atract" the visitor as well as it should.
On average a user only spends 30 seconds on your website before he hops off to another website, you have 30 seconds to make that visitor stay on your website.

Once you have a foothold in everything mentioned above, then consider starting your business ideas. They will be tricky, time consuming and require financial input to be truely successful.

As for hosting your website at home, please for the love of god don't. Not only may it break the TOS set in place by your ISP, but it will also extremely limit how many users can be connected to your website at any one time. A friend of mine tried it on a 10Mb connection of his, and it would hang his PC if more than 20 people were connected simultaneously. Pay for hosting, it's not that expensive, some packages start as low as $3 /month, with no minimum contract and a free .com domain (www.1and1.com).

Hopefully what I said was helpful, feel free to ask me any questions and I will try to provide as much help as possible.

Regards and goodluck,
Jonny.

 

[StudioWorks]

Read the tutorials that are available on loads of sites on the internet and there also are some nice books on sitepoint.com and amazon.

 

[mikepg]

Sorry it took me so long to reply, but I thank everyone here for their responses! I greatly appreciate it! I'm sure I am going to be able to find out what I need to know from the above.

I guess my last question that I really would like anyone's opinion on, and everyones is: What program (software) do you use for your web designing? What program would you use if money was not an object. I'm planning on using this a lot once I get started so I want the best of the best, and I figure why not start out with what I am going to be using.

I am somewhat proficient with Adobe Photoshop (haven't used many other adobe programs) so is their web design program decent?

Thanks again everyone!!

 

[bluearrow]

Combination of Photoshop and Dreamveawer is the best for Web design. Macromedia Flash would be the 3 rd tool.

 

[itme]

hello, im in the same position as you, i joined this site about 4days ago and have found it very good. soom of the people on here are very helpfull and will point you in the right direction. i want to start my own website on football betting and have various ideas about it but i just need to put them on the computer now so im going to learn htmls and all that other stuff and hopefully i can make sumin of at the moment this dream.

 

[slaydragon]

go to www.tutorialized.com ..there are lots of tutorials there avout web design.