Heartland

Now then knowledgable ones (I know you're out there ), could anyone recommend a decent Beginners Guide to Web Design? I wondered if there were any packages / sites that might set me off on the road to self-improvement.

PM or reply here as you please,

Cheers folk

PD

Reply here, you designery types, so the rest of us idiots can be enlightened also....

Probably the pros will kill me when I say this, but I just use Frontpage. A quite self-explanatory program.

It handles and feels like the rest of MS Office, so it's not too hard to get used to. Though I have to admit the look and feel of my site is far from professional (but I'm always interested in other solutions easy enough to work with )

I wrote my first web page with Notepad, very basic, but makes you realize the code behind the page. You can even use Word for web design.

there are loads of books out there, try searching for web Design in Amazon. The dummies books are good and starts from the floor up and I've always liked the 'in a nutshell' books

aye, probably easiest to learn by pissing around in something straightforward like microsoft frontpage or frontpage express and see how webpages hang together... basic concpets, layouts and stuff.

(dont bother with their frontpage extensions stuff though - just use basic html features)

then sack that off and have a look at macromedia dreamweaver to see how coding should be done.

then, sack all of it off, get a decent text editor and do it by hand

Yeah, despite all the people who may dislike it, I use FrontPage and have never had any problems with it. For anything basic, as my site is, FrontPage is fine. If you need to tweak it at all, it allows you to edit the HTML any way you want.

You can get a time-limited trial copy of Dreamweaver off the Macromedia web-site. You can then find the serial number with google to turn it into the full version.

Dreamweaver has some very useful help files and tutorials with it too.

I can never be ar$ed with hand-coding unless I absolutely have to.

and half the time its really not the html that lets a site down, its the images.

you'll probably need to grab a shonky version of photoshop too before long

Cheers for the replies - I knew I could count on you lot.

Mark - last time I tried that manouevre - for a DVD audio-ripper, I infected my pc. So thanks, but, erm, anyone got Dreamweaver on CD?

Frontpage it is, for now...off we go...

Quiff Boy wrote: you'll probably need to grab a shonky version of photoshop too before long

Mine is still registered to my sixth form college...

Three years after leaving!
That's what I call Network Support.

Code in Notepad myself, had a fiddle with Dreamweaver, FrontPage et al but never got the appeal.

On a similar note, if I may hijack Dave's thread...No, better not.

Oi, bugger off Sinister. Don't make me start posting in your special thread.

So, to embed a file in a page, erm, how? I tried to stick an .ncd file in my 'site', but it was having none of it. Am I shouting before I can goo? My mum did always say.

Using FrontPage by the way. Is this what you meant by not bothering with the extensions Quifflet?

If you're wanting to go down an entirely legal route, Nvu might be a good way to go...

Your browser probablly can't render .ncd files. Stick with .jpg, .gif and .png files.

hallucienate wrote:Your browser probablly can't render .ncd files. Stick with .jpg, .gif and .png files.

Planet Dave wrote:Mark - last time I tried that manouevre - for a DVD audio-ripper, I infected my pc. So thanks, but, erm, anyone got Dreamweaver on CD?

But the download version is the same as a version on CD. It's just the serial number that you need to type in (that's normally printed on the inlay when you buy a legal copy) that you need to get off t'interweb. No dodgy "kracks" to download or nothing.

Planet Dave wrote:Oi, bugger off Sinister. Don't make me start posting in your special thread.

I respectfully reconsider my comments.

Another vote for notepad.
In 1999 when I first got on the net using a Commodore Amiga I had my first website up within a few hours. I knew nothing about html before I started and learned the basics from looking at sourcecode of other sites to learn the basic layout and see how to display text, change fonts etc...
That said, it'd probably not be possible to learn that way any more, as so many sites like to overload their sites with unnecessary crap like flash and java that would totally confuse the beginner.

(EDIT to correct typos.)

yep, what dan said.

thats how i learnt - by looking at other site's source code... circa 1996 when the web was a much smaller and more simple place though

i just my friend to do it for me

i just asked my friend to do it for me

http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/

http://www.w3schools.com/

http://codepunk.hardwar.org.uk/index.htm