Newbie in need of some advice

[extreemsilver14]

Hi everyone,

I had a question about the web design process. I'm a new web designer learning by book, and am starting to get to the point that I can build my own (albeit simple) web page. I have seen several methods of building a site, but I don't know which one is best/most efficient/most popular. I've seen people use photoshop to do a mockup, and then splice it up. I've also seen people that like fireworks. It seems like more advanced sites have to come from one of those 2 methods, as HTML and CSS by themselves are somewhat limited. Or does someone know of a better way? By the way, I don't know javascript yet.... but I don't know how much that plays into my question.

Thanks for your help!

 

[GeneticOpera]

HTML and CSS is not as limited as you think, so long as you know what you're doing. I've found I can do more in notepad than in Dreamweaver. The best option when you're learning is to start wih basic HTML and move on. This will give you strong codes in the future and make it easier to fix problems in the future.
To see what a site uses, right click and select View Source.

 

[Paultbk]

Hi extreme, your kind of talking about two seperate parts of the website buidling process. Generally, the first step is to take your own ideas (or other people's templates for the ungifted people like myself) and use photoshop to get it exactly how you want. Fireworks is great for creating original design, where photohop is great for messing around with existing ones.

The second step after that is to take the PSD (photoshop file) and splice that into a website template (ie convert it to html and css) THis can be tricky and frustrating but the more you do it the better it gets.

I guess the final step would be to add javascript or php/asp etc onto your site...bear in mind that each of these 3 steps are usually done by 3 different people in larger organizations. My advice would be to try each one, find out what you like the best and specialize. Good luck!

 

[moodeyit]

it all depends on how to you want to build your website, dreamweaver is a good way, cause u can see the code and the design.