Advice to a newbie please

[nicktiler]

Hi
I am interested in learning more about website design.
My first attempt at web design was borne out of necessity as I have a limited budget and could not afford to pay the £500 plus I was quoted for a basic site.
Primarily I was not interested in being able to get customers, by them finding me on Google, the site was intended for people who picked up my business cards, so they could find out a bit more about me and also to view examples of my work.
My site may be a little basic to most of your guys standards. It was done free through Microsoft, by myself with no prior knowledge of how. Spent a Saturday afternoon putting it together, then a couple of hours tweaking it the next day.
I am now more interested in learning how to create a better site !
Are there any good books anyone can recommend - in simple terms that I will understand ! It would help me initially, rather than keep asking a load of questions here.
Would also like to learn about optimisation. And also which web design tools to use so I can create a better site.
Any advice would be appreciated.

thanks Nick

http://www.yorkshiretilingservices.co.uk

 

[wachtn]

First, a bit of praise.
You put your first site together in under 2 days without any know how? Thats impressive by any standards.

Now some advice
1) Read this article. It will help you get better answers to your forum questions.
http://www.cplusplus.com/forum/articles/1295/

2) Post you current site so we may see where you're coming from.

3) google 'good site design'

4) good luck to you.

 

[yelleyster]

probably the best way that you can learn is to get some advice from others by posting a thread asking for reviews of your site. that way you'll get some tips/opinions from people on what you can change, and how to change them.

everything takes time, and especially with web design and coding because there's a lot of behind the scenes stuff that you need to know for things to 'fit' how you want them too.

so grab yourself some headache relief pills, a lot of coffee, and write off at least 5 hours each day so you can put some time to learning how to design. because there's a lot of languages out there you'll need to tangle with, as well as a lot of debugging. the debugging is the most time consuming one if you ask me

 

[nicktiler]

Thanks for the advice, it is all the coding that confuses me. Have already come unstuck trying to follow advice about putting the correct google code in my meta tags, so google could validate my site
just could not get my head around how, where and what it all meant