Designing Website: Where Do I Start?

[skdyer]

I want to learn how to design websites. I studied computer engineering for 4 years so I've coded in a variety of languages but I've never specifically done web design.

Within the realm of web design I just don't know where to start. I guess my main questions are:

1. Do professional website designers who make nice polished websites manually code everything or do they use some sort of web design program that is more object oriented and does the coding in the background? Or is it some sort of hybrid combination of the two?

2. If most professional web designers do use some sort of web design package what is the best one?

3. Is it even worth starting out by just learning basic HTML coding or is that a waste of time? Should I just start with a web design program?

4. It seems like most websites use a combination of HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc.? What are the main things like this that I need to learn in order to design basic really well designed websites?

I guess that's all of my questions. Any insight you can provide will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[PeteAtoms]

Adobe's Dreamweaver is the most mentioned WYSIWYG website tools.
People who are prone to DIY projects and masochism use Notepad++
There is also an open source tool Kompozer.
I'm not familiar with webdesign, but I know there's a lot of hype around HTML5 at the moment.

You could try using services that give you a starting point w/ a free website:
Webs.com
Wordpress
Blogger
etc.

Some other resources I've come across:
http://www.opendesigns.org/
http://www.openwebdesign.org/
http://www.htmlprimer.com/
http://www.w3schools.com/

I know this might not directly answer any of your questions, but I feel like these might be good places to start

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

There is a lot of places to start and this would probably require a book to fill up. Some people will do all the pages manually by hand (either HTML or WYSIWYG) and then upload them to the server. Other people will use a Content Management System, which deals with the backbones of the thing and lets you deal with (as the title implies) the content.

In general, I read its a good idea to separate the CSS from the HTML so if you want to change a design you dont have to change every page manually.

WYSIWYG is What You See Is What You Get, which shows up like a word processor. Kompozer is a good free one. Nvu was, too, but now its not developed IIRC. For just the HTML, Notepad is the simplest, there are also specialized HTML editors. Kompozer has an HTML editor built-in, I find it useful.

A very common commercial one is Adobe (or is it Macromedia?) DreamWeaver but its expensive.

Two content management systems I can think of are WordPress and Joomla.

 

[GoodGame]

I'd go with the WYSIWYG suggestions. If you have MS Word, you can create a .doc and save it as a HTML. Probably only recommended if your website is only a few pages, since apparently you have to edit the styles of the word doc to make it truly what you want.


XML/HTML is really simple to learn (just grab a dummy book or download a free reference manual), but I gather the real power of appearance is in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). And also in using javascript to make the website execute code and act dynamically.