Where to begin?

[Seasought]

About the only work I used to do was basic HTML.

Now there are a plethora of routes to take with regard to website design. Anyone have any advice with regard to direction, or order of learning they found more effective/less effective than others?

I've looked around online of course, but I value the opinions of all of you here a good deal and would like to hear what you have to say.

 

[radiantm3]

I think the the best advice would be to stick with web standards and learn how to hand code your html. The web has great resources, but they tend to be very scattered. I highly recommend the book, Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman as a very good starting point into the web design world. He is one of the leaders that have been pushing this industry in the right direction. He also founded http://www.alistapart.com and http://www.webstandards.org. I would have saved myself a lot of trouble if I were able to read his book when I got started.

 

[whocares]

Learning how to code (X)HTML in plain text is essential, it'll give you full control over your pages and help you produce standard compliant code (WYSIWYG editor usually need some help to achieve this). Of course, once you're proficient in coding, using Dreamweaver etc. is good.


Producing valid pages allows you to blame lousy browser support for any problems you have


^^^^^ not true



radiantmark is right in advising to buy a book/books. However, I can't recommend any.

I suggest reading W3C's HTML 4.01, XML, XHTML & CSS specs (in that order ). They're written in a technical format, but are really quite easy to read. This won't teach you how to code HTML (they aren't tutorials), but it will help you understand how XHTML works, why you can't do this and that, and how to create standard compliant code.

XHTML is the latest "version" of HTML and is basically a restrictive use of XML heavily based on the HTML 4.01 standard. Once you can code valid HTML 4.01, it's pretty easy to transition to XHTML - this is where learning XML specs (quite easy) comes in handy! I'm not 100% sure of legacy browser support is for XHTML but all recent browser handle it fine.


I had basic HTML skills before doing this myself and would have probably wasted less time if I understood the bascis first!

 

[radiantm3]

Of course, once you're proficient in coding, using Dreamweaver etc. is good.

Funny thing is, the more proficient I became with hand-coding, the more I hated dreamweaver. Dreamweaver just slows me down now. Textmate for life! (or until something better comes along).

 

[whocares]

Funny thing is, the more proficient I became with hand-coding, the more I hated dreamweaver. Dreamweaver just slows me down now. Textmate for life! (or until something better comes along).

I completly agree and do most of my coding in SubEthaEdit (I hear TacoHTML is good but have been too lazy to try).
However many people like using DW or GoLive (especially in largish companies I guess) and didn't wan't Seasought to get the impression that using DW was bad, and that it can't be quite useful/powerful if you understand the underlying stuff

Of course we know that's untrue, but still <------ j/k

 

[Les Kern]

About the only work I used to do was basic HTML.

Now there are a plethora of routes to take with regard to website design. Anyone have any advice with regard to direction, or order of learning they found more effective/less effective than others?

I've looked around online of course, but I value the opinions of all of you here a good deal and would like to hear what you have to say.

There are several routes you can take... but here's how I did it.
Bought GoLive
Copied source code from web sites.
Deconstructed it.
Learned by "fiddling"
Took about a month of hard work, now web design is like breathing.
But that's how I learn most things... self taught. Classes suck for me as I may need to go a LOT faster or a LOT slower, and those classes plod along depending on who is at them.
Self-paced is golden.
Some recommended things like BBEdit... to me that REQUIRES knowledge of code... which I didn't have. GoLive and Dreamweaver let you CREATE right out of the box. I want to create, not dig down and learn all the standards, so it's nuts-and-bolts versus allowing yourself to create.
Other REQUIRED (IMHO) applications are Photoshop and more importantly ImageReady, part of the Adobe Creative Suite.

 

[whocares]

Thanks Les for posting, you just brought some balance to the "coder" oriented posts.

This brings up a question for Seasought: is your main focus on web development/coding, or on design? If the former knowing standards are essential; if the later well, they just help, and stuff like PhotoShop/ImageReady are more important.

 

[Chundles]

I wish we could go back to regular web pages. I am so sick of sitting around waiting for some stupid Flash introduction to load before I can enter a site, or waiting for the animation to proceed when I click on a link. It's mainly car sites where they have options in scrolling tabs under a photo or something, you click on the link and wait for the tab to roll down, spin, flash, move up and down, then a new photo loads and the tab turns into a different shape and so on and so on.

It doesn't make for a better web experience, it makes me click "back" and not visit your site. I'm all for good looking and functional web pages but not when they are so huge they take forever to download.

Yes, the world is moving to broadband, this doesn't mean that websites are allowed to undergo massive bloat because people are getting faster speeds. If anything they should be getting leaner to allow people quicker access to the downloadable content that is the real reason for high speed internet.

 

[joker2]

I wish we could go back to regular web pages. I am so sick of sitting around waiting for some stupid Flash introduction to load before I can enter a site, or waiting for the animation to proceed when I click on a link.

I wholeheartedly agree. Especially since a lot of these apparently aren't coded to standards and when I'm (forced) on a Windows machine, Flash "quits unexpectedly" every so often.

Yes, the world is moving to broadband, this doesn't mean that websites are allowed to undergo massive bloat because people are getting faster speeds. If anything they should be getting leaner to allow people quicker access to the downloadable content that is the real reason for high speed internet.

It used to be taught that the golden benchmark was loading in under 10 seconds on the prevalent modem-of-the-day - and the faster the better! 14,400bps was the standard when I first started out, going to 28,800bps with the next class I took. I still think it should be based on these, as not everyone has broadband yet, whether it be availability or financial. 56k is a pipe dream, still -- it's hard to get over 31,200 on a POTS connection any time I've tried.

 

[Seasought]

This brings up a question for Seasought: is your main focus on web development/coding, or on design? If the former knowing standards are essential; if the later well, they just help, and stuff like PhotoShop/ImageReady are more important.

I suppose just the latter (design)...my purpose is to diversify and of course make a better income.

 

[radiantm3]

I suppose just the latter (design)...my purpose is to diversify and of course make a better income.

You can't separate the 2 in web design. Both are equally important. I'd even go as far as to say that being able to code valid markup is a little more important than the design. In the end it's about delivering content.

 

[Seasought]

You can't separate the 2 in web design. Both are equally important. I'd even go as far as to say that being able to code valid markup is a little more important than the design. In the end it's about delivering content.

I was kind of under that impression but since I was asked to pick one I went with design.

I'm not averse to learning both to be honest, the more I know the better off I'll be.

Thanks for all the replies, lots of good information here.