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Web design: More thoughts on where to start »

Web design: Where to start?

Over the years, I’ve been told over and over again “you won’t need to do any code.” And yet, I have ALWAYS have ended up doing code. To take control of Web page design, you need to understand html and css. To make Flash to do anything, you have to know some actionscript. As a Web designer you will always need to understand some coding language.

How to get started? If you are already a designer, my advice is to start with the fundamentals of the Web. You can learn the basics without spending much money. Then you can decide if you want to invest in more software and training.

Learning html and css is easy. You don’t even need to spend any money. You can use free software like TextEdit, BBEdit Lite, TextWrangler or Wordpad. There are great online tutorials. After learning a little html and css you can move to a visual html editor like Dreamweaver. You will better understand what the software is doing and be able to trouble shoot the code if you need to. You can sometimes even make your CMS (Content Management System) do things it doesn’t want to do if you know how to add html code.

Other code is easier to learn after you have learned html and css. I’m not any kind of expert or programer, but I have a good basic understanding of how xml, javascript, and Flash actionscript works. That’s sometimes enough to be able to write my own actionscripts or de-bug XML that’s not working the way I want it to. And if I need to get a programer’s help, I can talk in a reasonably informed way with them.

Here’s a few good resources (and please share the ones you like.)

HTML tutorials

CSS tutorials

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 11:46 am and is filed under Code, Design, Online, Online journalism, Tutorial, Useful Web sites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Web design: Where to start?”

  1. Jason McGregor Says:
    November 10th, 2008 at 6:03 pm

    I’ve been using the book “Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML” and I’ve really found it easy to use. It’s a big book, but it goes rather quickly and I really feel like I understand the code I’m using and why I’m using it.

    While there was a lot of stuff to take in, it felt pretty straight forward.

    After working through this, I went on to a book on Dreamweaver and I quit using it half way through. I wanted my code to be clean and that seamed a lot harder to accomplish using the layout tools in Dreamweaver.

    I don’t mean for this to be an ad for “Head First.” There might be better books out there, but I was happy with this one.

    I’m still new to web design and I’m in the process of building my first site. Knowing .html makes this process so much easier.

  2. Alan Formby-Jackson Says:
    November 11th, 2008 at 1:42 pm

    Cheers for the links. I’m just finishing a course on Dreamweaver so anything extra is great.

  3. Desiree Says:
    November 11th, 2008 at 10:02 pm

    Jason, I’ll have to check out the “Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML” book. Thanks!

    I’ve found the O’Reilly “HTML and XHTML Pocket Reference” to be a nice little book to have.

  4. Desiree Says:
    November 11th, 2008 at 10:13 pm

    I like using a visual html editor for the speed. I used Golive for years and am very sad that Adobe discontinued it. Dreamweaver works fine, but I liked how simple GoLive was. I didn’t need all the extra things Dreamweaver does.

    But for clean code, BBEdit is the very best.

  5. Web design: More thoughts on where to start | Desiree Perry Says:
    November 12th, 2008 at 8:59 pm

    [...] Desiree Perry VisualEditors.com/Perry « Web design: Where to start? [...]

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