Learning Web Design
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@JaredBusch said:
@joyfano
@scottalanmiller nailed all the technical sides of web design, but here is also the aesthetic side of web design. Just because you can build a page, does not mean you are building a nice page.
I can code a technically compliant page and use good CSS. But I make not claims to good aesthetics.
Case in point: http://www.daerma.comThank you for the link. Saw your Design.
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@joyfano There is web design, and there is web development.
Though job descriptions tend to muddle the two together, they are very distinct and separate as @jaredbusch notes. There can be marketing, copywriting, photography, and a bit of legal involved. (Legal bits are "CYA" for claims, trademarks, and such.) Within web design and there is web development, there are several sub-specialities such as illustration, logo design usability, accessibility, and mobile developer.
@scottalanmiller is spot-on about the majority of "web stuff" these days is CMS based. Usually there is a long list of pleasing templates to choose (as he noted), as well as a selection of applets/modules for functionality. CMSes take much of "the pain" away from making and maintaining a website to allow one to focus on content creation (no small task!). Clever use of a CMS can create a site which is less obviously using a template/CMS (i.e., "a good thing").
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@scottalanmiller said:....most popular ones are WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, probably in that order....
"The Google" agrees—
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@scottalanmiller said:Great site. Takes a long time to work through it to see you like & things you don't (i.e., personifies your design aesthetic). As the site mentions, all the designs use the same HTML. Difference is custom art and hand tweaked CSS.
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Here is a free HTML5 Cheat Sheet. Just download the PDF and print out to work offline.
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Here is a free HTML5 book: http://diveintohtml5.info/
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LAMP software on a development system...
http://www.apachefriends.org/index.html
that is also helpful - basically have your test environment quickly loaded up where you need it.There are many of these packages and I'm sure others also have suggestions on which ones are better
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Finally i did my very first HTML sample work. Yahooooo Looking forward to learn more.
Thank you to all of you guys. Awesome. -
Congrats.
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All has been said really.
If you have windows, use WAMP. Will aid in making things easier (if you want)
If you have a mac, then MAMP.
No real need to learn how to setup mysql and all of that, it is nice, but since hosting companies are implementing one click installs, time better spent learning other elements.
Personally, I LOVE wordpress. It's superb, the communities are great and so many resources as outlined above.
All in all, good luck
Let us know how you are getting on, will be good to see some examples, even if on screen grabs
Thanks,
G.
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@Gabi Thank you. I am always interested to learn new things. I am learning working now with Linux. Been working to set up Mediawiki in Centos.
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I wrote our company website using Notepad entirely in classic ASP and CSS. There is no javascript. It is now looking pretty dated and I need to refresh it. The days of hand-coding websites seems to be over, and I think I need a decent content management system. The only options seem to be Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress. I'll probably use Wordpress for no particular good reason.
I bought a book on JQuery and Ajax, which I've yet to read, but as someone who doesn't really do web development the learning curve is pretty steep and I'm not sure it's worth my time trying to learn it.
Regarding classic ASP, I'm not bad at it, but it's too old now. I don't know whether to upgrade to dot ASP.Net or switch to PHP.
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PHP is far more portable. No need to be tied to an expensive Windows license.
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The other reason CMS's win the day is because search results are more about content than anything else. Each change Google makes shows this to be true. A website with great information about their product, their workers, their solutions, posts about anything relating the business is important to search engines AND people.
Until WP 3.0 (ability of user to add menus) I was still using Notepad to create website using simple PHP includes for the header, footer etc. I had a ton of PHP and Javascript scripts that I had tweaked over the years that I would use for certain items.
@Carnival-Boy I could give you many many reasons to use WP over the other 2. I have converted a few Joomla sites to WP.
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I like CMS's like I said, specially WP.
If you want to start from scratch, there are SO MANY frameworks, so many opinions and so many people arguing.
One that is really good (in my basic eyes) is Laravel. It is PHP based, use laracasts videos for learning, teaches you a load of stuff.
A yes, good old days of notepad with classic ASP (my case PHP) used to love includes and all of that.
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I learned the basics here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/HTML5-CSS3-Fundamentals-Development-for-Absolute-Beginners
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Good resource, thanks!
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So two years ago i posted this topic.. Hmm yeah i learned a little bit of everything!
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And how has the learning gone? What are you working on now?
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@scottalanmiller said:
And how has the learning gone? What are you working on now?
I'm working on Learning python, trying to understand the Variables, Syntax etc. Don't worry the CSS and HTML5 eBook you gave me a few years ago is still alive.
