Hi all,

I was looking for some advice, me and a friend who's a graphic designer are looking to do my girlfriend a website for her business and him one for his, I've helped another friend in the past with designing his and did this through Dreamweaver, and was going to look at doing the same for these? As my graphic design friend is able to create some stunning looking headers,footers,buttons and other images for the sites would it work putting these into to a dreamweaver site? I've been doing quite a lot of reading into dreamweaver and feel fairly confident at putting it all together, but I realise the coding won't be very good, however I really don't understand coding that greatly so I'm thinking this could be the best way for me?The way I was looking at approaching it was doing my friend sending me the files in .jpg then me imprting them and linking them to other pages we've created? Then the problem with SEO arises will it actually work with what I'm trying to do?

 

hope this all makes some kind of sense!

 

I understand a lot of what I'm doing won't be the best way but I'm open to suggestions and alternatives, I'm always looking to learn as much as possible.

 

Hope someone can help.

 

Many thanks

Bob

Might be me just being picky but i hate WYSIWYG i would much prefer to attempt to code the website up from scratch (it will also be a learning curve for you).

 

-Rakz

Might be me just being picky but i hate WYSIWYG i would much prefer to attempt to code the website up from scratch (it will also be a learning curve for you).

 

-Rakz

 

Agree with this, I'm a firm believer of "If you're going to do it, do it properly".

 

I'd recommend Treehouse for you to learn how to code HTML/CSS and other things related to web development.

 

Here's a referral link for you to join linked to my account if you want. You get your first month half price and I get a couple of quid knocked off mine too

 

http://referrals.trhou.se/jonhockley

HI.

Regarding your question about images. Are you talking about using images for navigation links ect? It's ok to do so because the search engine will still get the link destination from the href attribute. But you must make sure to specify an alt attribute with a desciption on every image.

By the way: jpg is not the best format for web graphics. The jpg compression is better for photos. If you are creating icons, text and symbols png is the format you should be using.

As you appear to be already aware of, the Dreamweaver Design View outputs some awful code which could affect the load times and SEO of the website as well make any future improvements by a professional web designer/developer next to impossible.

 

If you plan on making websites and maintaining them then you should definitely look into at least the basics of coding such as HTML and CSS (structure and layout respectively). You could also consider using a CMS to create the website which would have many SEO benefits as semantic code but you won't be able to use your own design unless you can get someone to code it for you which would defeat the object.

 

If you're not willing to learn code then I'd considering sourcing at least the design-to-code process to a professional, this may not cost too much depending on how awkward the design will be to convert and how different it will be on each page (if the design is more or less consistent then it will be cheaper as it should take less time).

 

Also, as Nillervision pointed out, if you do decide to use the images with Dreamweaver or any WYSIWYG software, save them as .PNG files rather than .JPG; in fact, Photoshop has a native feature to aid this process which can be found at File > Save for Web and Devices...

Whatever you do DO NOT PUT THE BODY TEXT IN IMAGES.

 

Really you should at least try and learn some of the basics. But start with what you know perhaps and just deal with each issue as it arises.

what about taking a template (even a simple HTML ) template, whack wordpress on it and use your mates imagery to "bespoke" it?

Thanks so much for all the comments, definitely given me a lot of food for thought! I'm thinking the way forward is to try and bite the bullet and learn Javascript! So was wondering does anybody recommend any good books or tutorial websites that will help me along the way? I've been doing a lot of research and it seems a mobile website is the normal thing to do alongside a normal site or am i better trying to do one with a responsive view? sorry for all the questions! I feel a bit stupid asking so many!!

 

Thanks in advance.

Yes!
Another golden opportunity to promote my JavaScript tutorials. It’s a series of 6 free videos for beginners. The videos have a very practical approach with a lot of useful examples. There’s a post here with links to all the tutorials. http://www.webdesignerforum.co.uk/topic/67771-video-tutorials-learn-javascript/

 

Enjoy. :-)

Thanks Nillervision I'll be having a look and trying those out over the weekend,

 

Many thanks

Learn using something like notepadd++ and use plenty of online tutorials e.g http://www.tizag.com/htmlT/ hope this helps :0 Any questions just ask