What should I learn next.....

Dj shaft

Hello,
I have thought myself some basic html, flash and form writing to complete the below 2 websites. What I was wondering is what should I learn next and what courses/books/websites do you recommend for this?

From my limited knowledge learing css and php were what I was thinking I should learn.

Examples of sites done are - http://www.ardrihouse.com/

and http://www.esteponarental.com/ Both which I still have to validate.

Cheers
Conor
(Also any hints on these websites let me know....)

forbairt

semi a hint ... semi what I think you should learn next ...

Play with Adobe Photoshop ... Trial available from their website ...

Tidy up the graphics on those sites ... they are blocky ... in places the Ard Ri title for example looks .. kinda very blockly ... The estapona image looks very ... poor as well ... was it scanned or ?

After that I'd recommend you look into Content Management systems ... they'll be a good intro to PHP .. if you choose a php based one ..

Joomla / Textpattern / wordpress ... play with those and try styling some themes ... it'll save you a lot of hastle ... custom php development is great but ... you've got to know a good bit about security .. and so on ...

but these are just my few cents on it all ...

DonkeyStyle \o/

Seconded on the learnging graphics front.
The ardrihouse banner is yucky... jpeg artifacts on a gif :eek: ... ruins* everything IMO.

*ba-dum tish

Dj shaft

Cheers lads for the replies,

What courses or websites/books do you recommend for learning more about graphics??

@ forbairt - what books/website do you recomend for learning content management systems from?

Again cheers for the advice lads..

forbairt

Dj shaft wrote:

Cheers lads for the replies,

What courses or websites/books do you recommend for learning more about graphics??

@ forbairt - what books/website do you recomend for learning content management systems from?

Again cheers for the advice lads..

I'm mostly self taught like most people in relation to web design ...

I'd recommend having a look at amazon for books on the topic you're looking for ... and see how other people rated them ...

As for a book for learning content management systems .. hmmm ... you'll probably want a specific book but for that you'll want to try out a few CMS's ...

have a look at .. http://www.opensourcecms.com/index.php or a similar site where you get to demo the software ... maybe play with wordpress .. its rather impressive with what it can do and it'd be a good start to ... fiddling with systems .. add in a plugin ... edit some code to make it do more of what you want ...

WhatsGoingOn

..and fix up the golf graphic on the things to do page, it is nearly 1.5Mb in size:(

Dj shaft

So anyone any recommendations on learning more than the little knowldege I have on graphics??

H3LLg0d

CSS

fundamental <in my opinion> on layout of a html type

A magnificent type of example is http://www.csszengarden.com/ where you can see the style and layout that other designers have done with the exact same Xhtml file that is non -editable. Browse the links on the site to see some great work that can be done with pure css

As for self training i highly suggest you visit
http://lynda.com
There are highly detailed and thoroughly explained video training courses available for download along with exercise files (premium membership)
or you will find most of the videos their from younowhere forums;)