Website design

Solidgone

Hi Chaps und Chappesses
I am thinking of learning how to become a website designer but have little knowledge on how to go about it. Google has been my first port of call and have had a quick scan of the Dreamweaver tutorial which seems fairly straight forward(ish) - Youtube is excellent. But my main question is whether I have to obtain a domain before I can learn how to design a template in order to find out whether I have the ability for web designing? My other questions is, is Dreamweaver CS5 a reasonable software to start with or should I go for the latest CS6. Is there a better cheaper option as a complete novice?
Any advice would be appreciated.

Cheers
Solidgone

LuckyReds

Have you got Skype or anything? I may be able to provide some pointers.

For just design you don't need a domain - you can just do it all on your own computer; if you get a collection of designs you want to share then it's best to look at hosting and a domain. One.com do a pretty good no frills package at a brilliant price.


Dreamweaver CS5 is good, I can't remember the primary additions to CS6 but I think a few of the features were aimed at mobile development. There's nothing you're going to miss with CS5.

As for cheaper options, Adobe sell the premium bells-and-whistles packages. I'm a web developer, and you'll be surprised at how little exposure I've been required to have with Adobe products. Surprisingly Dreamweaver can be good to begin with though, as despite the amount of features, it can be useful for providing some of the syntactic stuff that gets annoying after you've been typing it a thousand times! Similarly, features like auto-complete are good.

Personally I'm not much use when it comes to suggesting alternatives - at least not when I'm on my phone! But I can try and give a few pointers in about an hour or so when I'm at my computer!

For the record, I'm a developer with a few design skills that has the creativity of a lemon

I've posted another reply, but I'm waiting for its approval - probably because the amount of links!

siblers

As part of my Uni course we learnt CSS and XHTML. We havent used Dreamweaver but with CSS and XHTML you can do loads of different styles and layouts. Might be a bit hard to learn without a tutor though, its not that its hard as such just a lot to get to grasp with.
www.w3schools.org is a great site with loads of different tutorials etc.

swords_alive

I did a short course at Birkbeck for beginners. Good structured course. 4 saturdays or 8 evenings i think it was for a few hundred pounds. There's a project to do as part of it too, personally found that quite tough. They teach you CSS and xhtml, and you use notepad; the argument being you learn more if you learn the functions/ code etc yourself, rather than just the latest software product- move on to that later. By starting with the nuts and bolts then you can understand the more complex products more thoroughly but that may not be so relevant if its fancy graphics you want to get straight into.

Solidgone

LuckyReds/Siblers - thanks for your comments. I've just watched Dreamweaver introduction on Youtube which seems to cover all the bases and an idea of what to do. The good thing about youtube is I can go at my own pace and of course re-wind when necessary. It would be great if I could give you a shout when I encounter difficulties.

Solidgone

Thanks Swordsalive - you advice is noted. Should I feel it's a goer then I wont mind investing time and money. I'm just trying to feel whether its a direction I want to go into at the moment.

Nug

You'll need to learn both the technical skills for building sites as well as developing or having a flair for design. Dreamweaver is good (agree that cs5 is fine) but you will also need to learn some of the coding particularly CSS. This is crucial in designing sites. I design sites in photoshop first and then either work with a developer to build the site from them or do it myself (which usually takes me longer). Building a site that your client can update using a content management system is key too, otherwise you'll be getting a million emails asking to make updates, which is fine if they pay you. Wordpress is becoming quite a useful tool to this end, even though it was originally built to create blogs. When learning new software and even getting creative tutorials I have often used Lynda.com for a monthly fee it's library of subjects on all things design is immense. Good luck.

Solidgone

Nug. Good points to consider especially the content management system.

DRF

I am currently searching for a new website designer and I have a couple of tips:
Firstly make sure you can focus on technical skills and design ablity. Its amazing how many can only cover one aspect.
Make you website site the best thing oyu have ever designed, again its amazing how poor some web deisgners sites are.
Have loads of different examples of ideas. As yu have no clients at the moment these will just have to be examples of what you could do but make each one different. Too many sample sites where a version of the same thing in a different colour!

And lastly why have you chosen this field? If you are starting out (which it sounds like you are) it might be better to look for inhouse jobs to learn your trade before you set up on your own. Why would someoen pick a firm with no previous experience int he field? If you do want to go it alone from the off yu may need to offer to do some friends / small businesses or charity sites first before seeking paying clients.

Stig

Depending on the type of work that you'll be doing and the scale of the projects you take on, it may be useful to develop a wider skill set than just the technical and design skills mentioned above:
- Softer consultancy skills for building client trust and building relationships.
- Research skills for gathering information about organisational and customer needs.
- Project management skills to ensure that you develop sites that really do what the customer wants and aren't just designs that you like.
- Knowledge of how to drive customers to websites, rather than just having passive sites that you hope people will find on their own.

LuckyReds

[b]Domains etc[/b]
Don't worry about buying a domain, as I said in my previous post - most the development stuff you'll be doing is easily done on your own computer. If you begin looking at designing for things like Wordpress then you may run in to a stumbling block; but that can be easily by running a server on your PC. (This is trivial nowadays using packages such as 'WAMP')

If you make something you're proud of then by all means post it online. I'd go for http://www.one.com/ because they throw in the domain name for free and give you a years worth of hosting for £10; the next year it's something like £1.99 a month. Naturally if you take designing up as a profession there's options available like reseller accounts which means you can shave a little bit of money off of each job and provide the hosting for them too.


[b]Software[/b]
CS5 is fine! I personally do most of my work in Notepad++, as I just need to type bits of code; but for front-end/design work it's often more convenient to use something like Dreamweaver as it's WYSIWYG. (What You See Is What You Get) This just saves you the hassle of saving your work after every change then having to open it in a web browser to see how it looks.

There are free (open source) alternatives, like Aptana - but I dont think any of these have WYSIWYG preview options like Dreamweaver. To begin with though you probably wont need half the features!

Edit: BlueGriffon has a WYSIWYG feature!

[b]Learning[/b]
As @siblers mentioned w3schools is a good resource, although is does get a fair amount of stick.

This site looks like it could be alright for getting a decent introduction. There's some good Lynda.com courses on the subject, not sure if they're worth how much Lynda.com ask for them though.. Naturally, if you know where to look you can download the whole course content for free..

There's a couple good magazines on web design, and at the moment they all seem to have big thick magazine-book things in WHSmiths. These are generally under a tenner and have lots of tutorials and tips in. Definitely worth a read!

[b]Experimenting[/b]
Grab some free web templates from places like here [1 , 2, 3] and see how other designers have achieved things. Then mix it up a little; change colour schemes and just get your hands dirty a little.

Most of my design knowledge actually came from doing this!

Solidgone

DRF/Stig. Thanks for your input which contains sound advice. But just to provide a bit more background. I'm at my latter stages of my career and hoping to retire within the next 5 years and thought I could find something that I would quite enjoy doing and without pressure. I was thinking of website design as I've developed and designed databases and spreadsheets which have been given high praise from clients in my management consultancy role (covering the bases Stig has mentioned). But a mate of mine has a website to advertise his work but doesn't have the money to develop it further. As I have some IT skills I thought I would look into developing the website myself. Obviously web designing has its complications but over time I thought I might use this as a good working example for learning. Hence starting from scratch.

siblers

Solidgone, if you're coming from a IT background you'll probably cope fine with web design, you just need to figure out what part of the design you want to start off with and go from there. Im also doing Databases with my course, not very fond of SQL but I did quite enjoy CSS.
I used this book and found it very useful.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/HTML-XHTML-CSS-Visual-QuickStart/dp/0321430840/ref=sr_1_47?ie=UTF8&qid=1352815396&sr=8-47

Solidgone

Siblers - Thanks for the recommended book which I've ordered.