Hi guys, it's nice to finally join this wonderful forum.

 

I'm a cs graduate from johns hopkins and am thinking of making a shift in career into Web Designing. I have some experience back in college in regards to coding, so i think the aspect of web designing wouldn't be too alien to me.

 

html and css are pretty much the most important things i need to know and master first right? html is a given, but what are some other things that are a must know? A friend of mine mentioned a few things to me such as css , adobe flex, dotNet, Csharp, expression blend, flash/silverlight....

 

From your experience... what would be your personal approach to learning web desgining? html first of course, then css ? and what next?

 

Reason i'm asking this is that i know absolutely nothing about any of these products/technology other than html, and i would appreciate it if anyone could point me in the right direction and maybe share some of their experience.

 

 

In addition, what are some software you guys would recommend for a web designer? what's a very good html editor, what are the nice tools that i need to acquire.

 

Finally, does anyone know of any good sites for learning the stuff i need for becoming a good web designer? sites that have tutorials and guides on html, css, or anything that might be helpful for a guy who is just getting his feet wet?

 

thanks in advance.

HTML and CSS is the essential basic.

What's important to keep in mind that HTML should only define the semantic structure of the data. Anything related to layout should be done in a separate CSS file. A website isn't just viewed on a computer browser, it's being read out loud by screen readers, it's being printed, it's being accessed by mobile devices, it's being "read" by computers (search engines etc.)

 

http://www.alistapart.com/ is a great resource to learn and keep updated with important concepts and best practices within webdesign.

A good knowledge of html and php is the first thing. I would also recommend learning to design (using photoshop is a good idea) A basic grounding of Javascript and PHP scripts would be helpful at this stage.

 

AFter that you can choose what area you want to specialise in: SEO, PHP, Flash.

 

That is how i woudl do it anyway.

 

IF you can find yourself an online mentor, or a company you can do an apprenticeship at, it wont pay much (if anything) but the experience is invaluable.

 

 

Reaper

I wouldn't say PHP to be the first thing. HTML+CSS is the essential. PHP or similar (ASP, .NET) is needed when making dynamic content - but PHP would need to produce proper HTML documents, so you would need this first. And since it's best practice to separate layout from content CSS accompany HTML.

But when you start to feel warm and cosy with HTML+CSS start looking into client-side scripting (JS) and server-side scripting (PHP,ASP,etc...).

Personally I would stick to getting HTML and CSS down before you move on to dynamic stuff, as ReaperWD suggested try designing some layouts in Photoshop then when you feel you are progressing nicely try writing some simple PHP scripts.

I want to apologise for my previous post, i meant html+css not html+php.

 

 

Reaper