Hey, I've looked over the web design tools provided for furthering learning. I'm taken intro to web design courses and been able to produce my very first semi-professional looking site. I am looking to continue my learning outside of school and start to freelance. I'm vaguely familiar with java scripts, decent with tables, been introduced to cascading style sheets, and basically what you would learn in an intro course. Due to the vast amount of things there are to web design, I'm at a loss at where to go from here. I'm wondering from you guys that are doing web design, what do you think? What would be the next steps I take to give myself a strong base in knowledge base and move onto making some really professional sites. I appreciate all your feedback.
Looking for a bit of direction
- Thread starter Aokioji
- Start date
CaldwellYSR
Member
javascript and php/mysql are both really helpful to make the page more dynamic. I can't help but notice you said "decent with tables". I hope you're not doing your page layout with tables? If you are I really suggest you start using divs with css for your layout. Tables don't work well and tend to break very easily.
During my course I was forced to do a combo of CSS and tables. I actually don't know a good way of organizing my page without the basic outline of tables, and then doing the formatting in an external cascading style sheet. It's just how I was taught. I've heard of mysql, and that it was a very good thing to learn. It was suggested to me that I learn dreamweaver as well, but I wanted to learn how to write the actual code flat out, so thus far I've been writing all my pages in notepad.
CaldwellYSR
Member
I would get something like Aptana Studio or some other text editor that has code-hinting. There are many out there, my favorite is Aptana Studio. It's free and is very powerful. Dreamweaver might be a tiny bit better but it's also super expensive... It's a personal choice. As for layout I would completely stop with tables. Tables are good for building tables... not for layout. There are many tutorials for how to use a combo of divs and css to get much better results for your layout. You should check out:
This link
This one was the most helpful to me
This doesn't look bad either.
This link
This one was the most helpful to me
This doesn't look bad either.
CaldwellYSR
Member
Yeah no doubt I'm happy to help whenever you need it. You've got a great attitude about it. If you do get good with mysql you should learn php at the same time because they interact with each other quite a bit.
computerGeek
Banned
then, try having fun with back-end scripting.. learn about php, jQuery, asp, ajax and the likes..