Novice Web Designer

Hello all,
I am currently interested in learning how to design websites and such.
A friend told me that I should learn flash and html as a foundation for further studies of other scripts.
Does anyone else have any other suggestions for a beginner?

Other Thoughts:
-I plan on getting a new machine. (any suggestions, i was offered a power mac G5, but I'm kinda leaning on getting a secondhand macbook or something similar)
-I was told to start with Adobe Creative Suite, is master suite worth the extra money?

-Thanks in advance,
Andrew

I wouldn't start with Flash. Definitely go with HTML and CSS. Some people love Flash and some hate it, so I'd avoid that until you are more familiar with the basics. For general website design, you don't need much machine-wise since it's text. Graphic design may skew you towards something a little more powerful if you think you may really get into fancy graphics require rendering and such, but I think you'd be fine secondhand for now.

For learning HTML and CSS I'd recommend W3Schools.com.

They are the standard for learning the web and its languages.

And as a beginner, you'll probably want a free host to test your codes and scripts.

I recommend 110MB. They offer free web hosting and their service, in some cases, is better than paid hosts.

The interface in the control panel is second to none.

Between those two services, I've become quite a decent web designer in my own respect.

You could be too

What program would i use to code HTML and CSS on a mac? (I'm a novice mac owner as well)


-Andrew

http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/web-design-hosting/137054-what-web-design-program-use.html

if you want the big pro program then Dreamweaver

saying that RapidWeaver is a slick new kid on the block

You could just type them into an offline text editor, save them as .htm files, open your browser, go to File>Open File then browse and select the file you wish to test.

The neat thing is, if you edit the source file, simply refresh the page and the changes will take affect.

OR

You could use a host service as I suggested earlier then upload, or write the file there.

(I recommend both, it works fine for me)

onequarterasian said:

Hello all,
I am currently interested in learning how to design websites and such.
A friend told me that I should learn flash and html as a foundation for further studies of other scripts.
Does anyone else have any other suggestions for a beginner?

Click to expand...

For a beginner, I would learn HTML and CSS. I would also become knowledgeable with some type of graphic software, depending on you financial budget (ie if Photoshop is too expensive, then perhaps Pixelmator or Gimp, likewise if Illustrator is too expensive, then perhaps Inkscape, etc).

As you get more comfortable with this, then I would move towards a scripting language. i would recommend Javascript and PHP. javascript is for clientside scripting, and PHP is for serverside scripting.

After that, I recommend learning MYSQL and XML. Mysql is a database which is a popular combination with PHP. XML will help with AJAX and Flash (though debatable how much XML is in AJAX)

At this point you can start reading up about AJAX.

Then learn Flash. The learning of the graphic software will help making good graphics in flash. PHP will help you learn Object Oriented Programming for Action Script 3.

Flash and Javascript (some AJAX too) will then help you start learning Adobe AIR and develop web applications (or Google Code).

I'm a novice too

Hi,
I've been learning html from a Creating Web Pages For Dummies book and just putting it straight into the TextEdit program.
Although I've not got very far with it (it's just a hobby more than anything else) I've found it pretty easy going and any problems I've encountered have been sorted with a little help from various people on this forum;-)

If you go on any web page and view the page source (Command U) you can see the html coding for that page and after a while you can relate the codes to what you see on the page.

I'm aware of CSS but I've not got as far as learning it.

If you don't want to pay out for any software program just yet it's worth having a go, however if you need something up quickly it may be easier getting a program where you put everything in place and it translates it into html for you.

Hope that's of some help!

I recommend Editra as your HTML/CSS code editor - it has some great features like syntax highlighting, and it's also open source!

Freeway Pro 5

Try this out. You can download a free 30 day trial. The company is softpress.

Softpress: Makers of Freeway - the easiest and best web design software for the Apple Macintosh or Mac

CW

you want to learn html and css first its best to start doing this in a plan text editor then move on to software like dreawaver or KompoZer to help you code it but you do want to make sure you understand how too do all the code in a plan text editor if you move to software like this eg make sure you can make a good website in just a text editor first. i also say W3Schools.com.

is a good place to start but also gogole learn html and then css when you are ready. Tizag Tutorials is also a good place as well.

you should only learn flash when you now the basic as its an exta thing to use on top of html and css.

hope this gives you a better point on where to start

Beginning CSS from beginner to expert (Simon Collison) was a pretty good book to teach you the basics of CSS and xhtml. dreamweaver will help by giving you code hints, but you can do it all in a basic text editor.

1.xHTML
2.CSS
3.PHP
4.Javascript

Learn those four and you'll have a strong foundation to build rich, dynamic, quality sites.

A good free text-editing program is TextWrangler or TextEdit which comes with the Mac. If you have some money to spend I'd recommend looking into Coda, BBedit or Espresso. You'll also need an FTP client. CyberDuck is a good free application. Some of the text-editing software I mentioned have them built-in.

The Creative Suite will suffice. I don't see it necessary to spend the extra money on the Master collection.

And to answer your question about what machine to get. I'd go with the laptop. It's nice to be able to take your work with you and update/work where ever you want.

Good luck with it all!