Web Design

[eddiespangle]

Does anyone know any simple ways to get into the wonderful world of web design? Any pointers would be most welcome.

 

[eric]

Try a part time course @ collage

 

[marklaverda]

try google: many FREE courses for the web design beginner online

 

[RoofTops]

There are perhaps two approaches - learning HTML from one of the many tutorials you can find with a bit of quick Googling and essentially creating a webpage from a blank canvas or take an existing package and adjusting it to suit, using for example, themes which you can download for free. The advantage of the latter approach is you will probably end up with something a lot slicker and a great deal quicker than the HTML way - which is probably going to give you something like the late Dave Cushman's site - brilliant though it may be on content it is hardly going to win any design awards. I have a suspicion most college courses and many of the web design tutorials you will find on the net are likely to be about the HTML approach and to be honest this is all a bit dated now for most users.

There are a number of applications which can be downloaded and one I have recently started using is WordPress. This was originally created for on-line blogs but it can be readily adapted to other uses, particularly what are generically known as CMS or Content Management Systems which is the sort of site you might want to create for a club or small business.

I use 123-Reg as a host and you can register your domain name with them and then get web hosting from about £2.50 a month. There are of course plenty of other providers but with 123 you can get WordPress for free - but check the package you are buying first.

I built my first site using WordPress in about a couple of days - but most of this was learning curve. Once I had cracked the concept it was very quick to do. All the design is done for you in the themes so you are really just altering what is written on the page. It does require some programming knowledge but you will find tutorials to help on the WordPress site. A big advantage over home-written HTML code is a lot of things are available as plug-ins, for example if you want a Contact Us page this is very simple to implement and the result has spam filters etc which would be a painstaking thing to write yourself. They weren't needed in the early days of web design but things are a lot more complicated now - such as the wide variety of browsers in use.

There is some more information on this approach here:

http://www.graphicdesignblog.co.uk/wordpress-as-a-cms-content-management-system/
http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/wordpress/awesome-websites-wordpress-as-a-cms/
http://wpdude.com/wordpress-cms

There are plenty of other examples and resources available which you can find with Google.

 

[Brosville]

Many web companies will give you a "point and click" interface from which you can install all sorts of database-driven software -(including Wordpress) - I use "Knethosting" - £17.99 per annum, space for up to 6 websites, and "Softaculous" built-in - http://demo.softaculous.com/enduser/ -I also use 123 for just registering the domains, (they're much too expensive for web hosting...)

As others have said, the templating means you can have a really good-looking website very simply - and quite frankly you'll probably (with a modicum of practice) be able to do far better than what a certain beekeeping organisation was foolish enough to part with £17,000 for!

 

[Headnavigator]

Agreed that the point-and-click rather than HTML is the best way to explore, even if you want to do it the hard way later. You can get free template-based web design software which is fun to play with from several sources, Serif is one I think is good, but if you Google 'free web design software' or similar you'll have tons to choose from. Equally if you have Microsoft Office you can use MS Publisher to practice web design after a fashion. You can view what you have created as if it were a website, you can even go the whole hog with it but it's not the easiest to get online or manage when you have! Good Luck and have fun!

 

[beeboybee]

would recommend.... www.weebly.com excellent and very intuitive to use....
couple of evenings and i managed this www.structuraltimberdesign.co.uk still work in progress. oh did i say its free to use with payment options for extra functions

i love it

 

[eddiespangle]

Good Stuff

Thank you...a lots of excellent information for me to trawl through,

 

[JamezF]

Why is it I feel this might be appropriate at this point:

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell

James

 

[Monsieur Abeille]

May also want to check out Moodle, Silverstripe and Jumla - all similar in concept to Wordpress, different strengths and weaknesses