Designing and creating a new website

gnolan

I am a novice when it comes to web design and creation; to be more specific, I started learning how to use Dreamweaver on Tuesday! I have done one of the tutorials on the Adobe site and that seemed to go fine. It was the Check Magazine Website one. At the same time, its very hard to go wrong when all the files are there and ready for you to implement in the website.

I guess my question is, where do you start? And i mean this at a really fundamental level. Obviously you decide what you want your site to look like, sketch it out perhaps? And then is it a case of creating the exact image of your site in Photoshop or Fireworks, but it being just that, an image, with no working links or interactive content?

After this it is a case of creating the website in Dreamweaver with the aim of making the website look exactly like the image created in Photoshop? On that note, is Photoshop or Fireworks the way to go when developing images for a website?

Thanks for your help

nellyshark

Fundamentals: get to know html and css. Not through a wysiwyg editor but a knowledge of it yourself.

Something like http://www.csszengarden.com/ should showcase the benefits of css

tricky D

When it comes to learning, start learning basic html, then proper xhtml and css as these are the fundamentals. http://w3schools.com/ is a good place to start before going anywhere near the likes of DW. You say, 'its very hard to go wrong when all the files are there and ready for you to implement in the website' which I wouldn't agree with at all. All these kinds of tools have their pros and cons which unless you've started from the the real baseline fundamentals could easily land you in a mess. One thing most people don't realise is that WYSIWYG doesn't work on the Web. There are differences in browsers' rendering engines which make WYSIWYG actually unattainable, so you need the fundamentals to get around these inconsistencies. Personally, apart from one or two odd requirements, the only thing I use DW for is multi-line Find and Replace.

When starting a site you shouldn't start with how you want it to look. You start with its functionality. Form follows function is a design fundamental. Write it out a hundred times. After that you can use a WYSIWYG, PhotoShop, Notepad++(ftw) or whatever combination makes sense/works/whatever.

PhotoShop or Fireworks? Not too sure, haven't Fireworks in years. I started with PhotoShop long before Fireworks came out. Fireworks basically takes just about all its functionality from PhotoShop anyway but has some prepared functions like exporting slices which PhotoShop doesn't have readily available (but easy to do). But for photographs (retouching, colour correction and a thousand other things) and a ton of other graphic techniques and resources PhotoShop is so much more powerful. Imho, mostly it's kinda like a heavyweight against toddler - no contest.

DublinWriter

What nellyshark said.

Try googling for examples of good and bad website design.

Remember minimalism is the new black.