Recommendations for Web Design Newbies
Over lunch today I stopped at the bookstore to check out some books in the Internet section. While looking over a book, a store employee brought a young woman to the section filled with website design books and said, “well, here it is!” (Okay, I’m paraphrasing but that’s about as much help as he offered her.) She stared at the dozens of books available, grabbed one that mentioned a design program she’d heard of before, and started thumbing through the book.
I felt bad for her. She’d been dumped in front of a whole lot of confusing information and didn’t know where to start – I’ve been there! Fortunately I had some helpful folks along the way who steered me toward the right topics to study. I decided to pay back the favor by helping someone else.
When I asked asked what she was trying to do, it turned out she wanted to make a fairly simple website, but just couldn’t remember all of the things they taught her back in the college class she once took. I’m glad she didn’t walk out with a book on Dreamweaver!!! I gave her some basic advice on where to start her learning process and made some website recommendations for research.
My General Advice
- Learn about Standards Based Design
- Learn About CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
- Be wary of anyone who instructs you to use tables to layout your webpage – This is ‘old school’ and NOT recommended!
- Be wary of ‘old advice’ on the Internet – the practice of web design has changed a lot in the last few years and there are plenty of old sites laying around
- Start your research on the web unless you just learn better from a book
- You don’t need software any more complex than a text editor to create a website (an image editor is helpful, but you’d be amazed at how much can be done with just a style sheet!)
Website design can be a huge topic, but you don’t need to go crazy to put together something nice. Start with a small project and learn good standards based design skills. You’ll discover whatever else you need to learn about through the process.
Standards based design basically means seperating the content of your website (the HTML pages) from the layout and design (the Cascading Style Sheets.) There are many excellent reasons for doing this and the websites I recommend at the end of this article will point out most of them. One big one is, if you ever need to change the design of your site (and you absolutely will) you don’t need to change every single HTML page – only the Style Sheets.
Visit www.CSSZenGarden.com to see the power of this approach. You can select different designs from a list and the website look will change radically. But, the HTML of the page never changes. You really have to see it to get what I’m talking about.
There are a number of great web links listed on the Zen Garden site. They are all good. Here are some of my favorite resources on web design:
- www.W3Schools.com – Online tutorials and reference guides to just about everything you might want to do on the web!
- W3Schools Web Building Primer – This is THE PLACE TO START if you are new to web design
- www.CSSZenGarden.com – See the power of standards based design in action!
- www.AListApart.com – Great collection of CSS design articles
- www.WestCiv.com – Free Introductory information online and a comprehensive version for sale
- www.Glish.com – Sample Layouts that you can use for your website project
Recommended Web Design Books
Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML -If you don’t know where to start, start here!
Eric Meyer on CSS – the book that was recommended to me for learning about standards based design
The Zen of CSS Design – you’ve seen the website, now read the book it inspired!
Good luck on your web design projects. Email if you have any questions.
The Go-To Guy
GoToGuy@AndrewSeltz.com
P.S. If you are looking for a web hosting company, I highly recommend www.1and1.com. They are the company that I use for this site and others I manage.
