New to web design - all help appreciated.

Hi,

Ive recently been asked by my work to revamp the company website - however I have no idea where to start.

Would anyone be able to give me a few good starting tips? For example books to read, useful websites and what software to use?

Any help would be appreciated

thanks

Matt

Ok, as a beginner and if you want to do this right I think its vital for you to learn some HTML before you do anything. So a book or 2 on HTML would be a good start. To start with you will only need Notepad to learn HTML so your initial costs will be pretty low. I would however recommend using Dreamweaver as your web editor - it has both code views (for seeing the HTML code) and it also has a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) mode, so you can do your layouts easier in this then switch to code view to tidy it up. It can be a pretty costly piece of software though - maybe see if your work will buy it for you!

With regards to websites, forums such as this are a great help, there are plenty of people out there willing to help - and if you have ANY problem no matter how silly it is just post a message. We have all been there at some point and there will be no shortage of help

Other sites of use are :

www.sitepoint.com
www.webdesignforums.net
www.htmldog.com
http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/index.html

Hope this helps and Good Luck!

Thanks for the advice sparky!

Ive asked work to buy me a HTML book - but I doubt they will get me Dreamweaver as we already have frontpage as part of the Office package. Is this ok to use? Is it easy?

Thanks for your help

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Dreamweaver is ok for starting with web design and propably the best WYSIWYG html editor

Thanks for the advice sparky!

Ive asked work to buy me a HTML book - but I doubt they will get me Dreamweaver as we already have frontpage as part of the Office package. Is this ok to use? Is it easy?

Thanks for your help

BAH! Only use frontpage if there is absolutely no alternative! It adds so much unneccesary code it unbelievable - I would just use notepad to be honest if I were you.

I pretty much agree with what Mark said... to a certain extent.

If you are just starting out learning HTML is the key to build a sound base knowldege of what you will be doing. However using a WYSIWYG editor is pretty much the normal way to design your sites. If notepad is the only option open to you then I do say use it but just be aware that its not producing the neatest code ever and as soon as you can buy dreamweaver !

Maybe someone on this forum knows of a free WYSIWYG editor so you dont have to use frontpage? I myself have been lucky and have always used Dreamweaver so I have never had to look for such an editor... anyone got any suggestions?

Yeah.

Frontpage sucks as it produces Internet Explorer only code wich in most cases is full of not neccesery stuff that make the page load slower

My advice for you would be to go through the website and write down everything that could be improved/changed. Once you have done that use a editor such as Dreamweaver or EditPlus (FREE) which can be found at http://editplus.com to edit your work. If you have some money to spend a good coder and designer can be hired for about $200 dollars depending on how big the work is. Hope some of this helps.

Cool, have had a look at editplus and it looks a pretty decent piece of software. Thanks for that link!

Ok, I will try editplus - have been doing a lot of study and may have some more questions for you guys soon!

Thanks for your help so far!

Don't use frontpage. It is hard to understand and it writes in alot of content in comments which is hard for a person to understand. Also, when uploading, sometime important files are uploaded making alot of the fancy objects not to work. You also need special hosting which may cost more.

I use EmEditor, like notepad but adds colors and such.

I suggest coding my hand. xhtml/css is possible.

If you're just starting then I reccomend the links above, and you could also read:

HTML, by: Kramer.  It's part of the visual series. It's extremely newb friendly.

good luck

if frontpage is your only choice you might be better off coding by hand depending on how much you already know.  I do all my html development in notepad and couldn't be happier.

I would use dreamweaver over frontpage is you had to use a wysiwyg editor.

I'm fairly new to web design as well, thank you for all the tips they will help me as well.

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