Hello all,

I've recently bought a website address and domain to host the site but i haven't a clue as to how i make a website or to upload it. Can anyone enlighten me as to what programs a beginner can use to create a site? I have some knowledge of dreamweaver and fireworks but only played around with them.

For graphics work there's Adobe Photoshop, which, while pricey, is great. A free and viable alternative is The GIMP.

If you already have Dreamweaver and Fireworks, you've got a nice head start, as those are my two personal favorites for those.

Unfortunately I can only offer you advice on programs, as my graphical and design skills are....well, limited. There's a reason I got into coding and backend work with websites

There are a few essential tools for web design - when I say essential I refer to professionals these are:

Dreamweaver 8 (or any previous version really)
Photoshop (a must for image editing)


Now a few languages you will need to at least become accustomed to:

HTML
CSS

Once you've mastered those languages you can proceed to a server side language to offer more advanced interactivity like:

ColdFusion
.NET
Java Server Pages (JSP)

As an aside, Adobe Photoshop is only half of what Adobe has to offer. It's companion program ImageReady is easy to overlook, even though it is typically bundled with Adobe Photoshop. Image Ready's primary virtue is that its absolutely one of the best ways to keep even large graphic files at a manageable size and you can even manage to take a look at all of the different styles of graphic compression before you dedicate any processing power or time to do so in a 2 or even 4-up style. Beyond that it can handle animation files as well and handily divides images into HTML tables and other such useful things. Definitely a plus for those looking to make the visual design part of webauthoring simpler.

AH yes FireWorks .. Fireworks is great for beginners.

Personal I use fireworks to do my layouts, and most of my design work. Then I export the .png file into an .html file then import that in Dreamweaver.
And Finally I use flash to do my interactive work...

I was in your same situation about a year ago. I started with FrontPage,but quickly moved to Dreamweaver. But as others have posted here, the other companion programs with Macromedia's Studio MX suite are great to have as well as you learn what you want to do.

I also use Adobe's PhotoShop CS.

You will also find this forum has a lot of experts with a LOT of experience. Find someone that has recently been through the learning process and who does not mind answering your beginner questions. By all means ask a lot of questions and ask them sooner rather than later after you have begun to get frustrated.

Good luck.

Thanks for the replies it's much appreciated. so far i have the Macromedia MX 2004 suit. I've been messing arounsd with video on the website just to see what i can do and how it all works but i am stuck on something to which i'll start another post.
So now i need to learn HTML and CSS, what about this PHP i've heard about? As for HTML and CSS does anyone know of good books for a beginner?.

Hi Doug, with regards to your question about good books on HTML and CSS, I recommend that you look at any of the books for beginners and see which one presents the material, examples, etc in ways that appeal to you.

I did HTML first and then a year later started learning CSS. If I had it to do over again, I would do both at the same time.

Eric Meyers has a couple of good books on CSS. Also I found a site that will allow you to design a page layout and it creates the .css file for you. You can then download both the .html and .css files and begin to play with them.

That CSS builder site is http://www.csscreator.com/. This site is a great resource for other related information as well.

The other thing most programmers will tell beginners is to view the source of some simple pages and see what markup tags to what. You can save a web page to your local drive and then open it in Dreamweaver and play with it.

good luck

johnboy

I personally believe that you should learn by hand-coding your web site. This isn't because I hate big companies that make web authoring tools or anything. In fact, I really like Dreamweaver. However, most of knowing what to do in web development is understanding how the technology works. You gain none of that understanding if a program does the work for you. If you aren't under any time pressure, I would strongly suggest you take the time to learn to hand-code at first.

For graphics, I like Photoshop. I think it gives you the most versatility and ability to make graphics that aren't obviously created with a "wizard".

MOST importantly -- more important than code, graphics, or anything else -- is design. Short book that makes a world of difference is Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug

I agree with dlynn. If you become dependent on GUIs to build your site, you will be at a loss when your site breaks and/or it's throwing an error that you can't decipher because, well, you didn't write the code, the program did it for you. You will learn this one way or another...

This situation's very similar to people learning Linux/BSD/Unix. The people that I started out teaching that learned using the command line are much more advanced than those I know who started on a mouse-driven interface. I also know this from personal experience. When I play around with "easy" distributions for a while my skills get soft.

If you are morally opposed to downloading warez or financially strapped, Gimp is a fair stand-in (and free) alternative to Photoshop.

Don't forget Paint Shop Pro either - it's a great inexpensive alternative to PhotoShop.

I personally LOVE LOVE LOVE Fireworks for my websites. Use it religiously and since I have gotten into CSS for layout, I have moved away from ANY GUI to do layout, I've not used Dreamweaver in about 2 years. But before that - I SWORE by Dreamweaver to help me with Rapid Application Development. Be very careful using a program like Dreamweaver if you are trying to LEARN how to code. The code it generates is VERY complex and obtuse.

Learn how tables work in HTML - but try not to use them to layout your site. LEARN CSS FOR THAT - you will thank me in the long run though it will cause you nights of lost sleep when you first start. If you start to layout your sites in tables you will go down a dark path that will be hard to unlearn, trust me, I've been there.

My favorite book and BIBLE for doing CSS for layout : http://www.sitepoint.com/books/css2/

Freebie Chapters - 165 pages!

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I'm including the website addresses of some sites which will help you in the design process.

1) http://www.hostmysite.com/order.cfm?id=247

You will use this to sign up for an account.

2) http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html#

This is a great site which will guide your choices and options for a color scheme. Remember: neon-like colors, very bright colors, and most greens are not your friend in web design.

3) http://www.w3schools.com

I cannot emphasize enough how great this site is for beginners. I used it when starting out and it's a great way to learn the basics of HTML coding and CSS (as well as other languages).

4) http://www.csszengarden.com

This is a great site for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) templates which are free to download.

Please let me know if you need anything further, we are here to help. Thank you for hosting with hostmysite.com and have a great day.

I am a beginner to web design too. Actually, I am still planning to learn. I am thinking of enrolling to a course in web design. I realized that there are lots of things I need to learn. Any further of the basics that I need to prioritize in the course?

My PC has Windows XP home edition. I have been working through a dreamwaever course and have learned a lot about building static HTML pages. Unfortunately, now that i need to build a dynamic page, i am told that in order to use Active Server Pages (ASP) i need to have, at the very least, windows XP professional. Do i really need to upgrade? Is apache or ASP.Net a viable alternative. I admit to being totally bewildered as how best to continue as i would like to use the latest software but do not want to waste the dreamweaver experience i have gained so far.

The coding of your webpage has absolutely zero bearing upon what Operating System your home computer runs. I could code ASP.Net on my Powerbook G4, but that doesn't mean I'm going to use my Powerbook G4 as a web server. Simply put, code your page in Dreamweaver, upload the changes you make to your website. You don't need to use Windows XP Professional on your home computer, even though it is a better operating system than Windows XP Home on many levels. As for that particular topic (and many others), you should do any research yourself rather than simply trusting an anonymous posting on the internet. You will learn more in the end and that is always good.