Not really sure where is the place to put this post so sorry if its the wrong board.

 

Just wondering how you all started?

 

I have started doing a site but really have not a clue what I'm doing. I read about messy code etc, mine is bound to be all over the place lol.

Can you start off by just messing around? I did a page yesterday......have no idea if it'll work, how to add more pages (yes total idiot here) or anything else. I designed the site in psp and then tried to recreate it in dreamweaver, I had to alter a few things as didn't have the knowledge to do it the same as my original plans, although the page looks close.

start with the basics. Learn how to code a basic site site without the aid of dreamweaver or any other web editor. Go to http://htmldog.com/ nd have a look through the tutorials, this will help you get an understanding of how sites are constructed correctly. Yes it is fine to mess around, but it is better to mess around with code and see what it can and can't do rather than mess around with a WYSIWYG editor.

 

 

 

As for how I started, I started off messing about with code in notepad, making bright yellow sites with pink scrolling marquees, as I though moving text was very impressive

Yeah, sounds about right lol. Thanks.

I do tend to go through the code as well and tend to insert all the aspects using the code area rather than the image as I can kind of see how its all going together easier there, but I do like to see the image at the bottom too, then I view it in a browser as it can look different again there. I still feel lost though.

I have this web site though I really need to get it done soon.

I will have a look through those tutorials though, thanks.

 

TheDragon

I personally used w3schools (not classes as poor and outdated), it really gives your the foundations about images and links and paragraphs, from there I began producing table-based layouts, and then you learn to replace that with CSS-based design.

I loaned a book on HTML from the library. Sat down, read it all, went to my computer, opened notepad, made a site with a black background and white text, changed the colours of links and thought that the title tag was the coolest - it changes part of the BROWSER! Wooo....

 

Then I went on to make horrific all-centered layouts, used the marquee tag, used flash inappropriately. Wrote several HORRIFIC table-based designs with lots and lots of bevels and fell in love with javascript roll overs.

 

Eventually I understood what CSS was for, realised my code was bad, practiced my graphics skills, and I'm getting there slowly

lol Love it!

I have a book on html, did start it, kids holidays happened and concentration went.

I think I'll start it again then, I want to make horrific things too lol. Although, I may have already done that!

I did pretty much the EXACT same as Eris.

I started editing someone else's table site then learnt css and made my own. Start simple, when you see a site you like always look at its code to see how things are done.

I started in fairly much the same way as Eris, books loaned from library, but I bypassed table layouts altogether and went straight in with CSS. At first I used CSS templates from sites like code-sucks.com and modified them, and then moved onto my own CSS layouts. It's not as hard as you think. Give it a try, and good luck.

My first site was hideous, too. The animated gifs were vomit inducing!

It was long years ago when i started. My sister brought the idea to create a MFA site for the local Sziget Festival. The site built up from tables designed in photoshop and converted to html by imageready. The site was not very bad, but did not make us rich at all

W3schools site, and Google have been my friends during the long journey.

I did pretty much the EXACT same as Eris.

 

I started in fairly much the same way as Eris

 

Such copy cats! It was my first experience with any kind of code. I loved being able to tell a computer what to do , which is why I did Computer Science and got into programming

I did that!! I remember it all so clearly, a html page with a yellow background and blue writing and a red and yellow marquee. Plus about 2 zillion animated GIFS.

 

Talk about bad design!

I did that!! I remember it all so clearly, a html page with a yellow background and blue writing and a red and yellow marquee. Plus about 2 zillion animated GIFS.

 

Talk about bad design!

 

Same here!

Before I even entered onto the net as a designer I was playing with FrontPage a lot... Made a few cool sites considering

 

I then went to table based designs in dreamweaver once I had a grasp of HTML... Then about 3 years ago I switched to CSS designs - at first tables and css then one day full css with no tables - That for me was a big milestone.

 

Take a look at some free templates and pick them apart and see what you can do.

QUOTE (k9ruby @ Aug 15 2008, 08:56) *

I did that!! I remember it all so clearly, a html page with a yellow background and blue writing and a red and yellow marquee. Plus about 2 zillion animated GIFS.

 

Talk about bad design!

 

 

Same here! laugh.gif

 

Lol...I know, I remember when I was around 8/9 me winning a competition and her treating me to Serif Webplus 6 in PC World lol

 

Ahhhh, fun times!

Hmmm well, when I was 13 I wanted to be a video game designer so I bought a book on C programming (I had zero programming experience at the time). In the book there was a link to a web forum for C users. I would post in there every once in a while asking questions and such. Eventually, when I just turned 14, I saw a topic about HTML and JavaScript. I was intrigued by it and I learned HTML quite quickly. I got bored of HTML because it's a real "language" and at the time I disliked JavaScript, so after some searching I came across PHP. And then shortly after I saved up money (being 14 sucks) and bought a website. It was, at first, a horrific little monster. Red background and black text with scrolling text and animated gifs. But eventually I caught on and learned CSS and a bit of photoshop. Now I'm almost 18 and I still enjoy my hobby. 8D

 

I used to use Web Studio 2.0... Echhh GIFS EVERYWHERE! lol

I started after wanting a website for my garden maintenance business. Couldn't afford the prices that local companies were charging so thought I'd build my own

That was about 4/5 years ago. Began by reading some books to do with frontpage/publisher etc . Always been a book person and to be honest, never thought of looking online for tutorials (I've only owned a computer for the last 5 years and didn't really understand the internet at the time). Didn't like those 2 programmes at all (nothing to do with the code that was produced, didn't understand that at the time), and almost gave up .

Then I came across a book (Easy Web Design, can't remember who published it) and, although a pretty crap book in hindsight, it opened my eyes to html/css and the fact that you don't need to use a WYSIWYG editor.

I, like notbanksy, have never learnt to build a site using tables and I think that makes it easier for me in many respects as I haven't had to 're-learn' the css way.

I'm still a 'book' rather than an 'online tutorial' person and would recommend any of the 'Head First' series by O'Reilly and anything by Larry Ullman. The MySQL Cookbook is a great book too.

Good luck with your learning! Try and enjoy it. I'm sure that most of the members on this forum really enjoy their work and I reckon that web designers/developers are the most laid back people ever

Pretty similair path. Always had a love of website design - sparked by the glut of load heavy flash sites back in the day. Got wind of potential redundancy a while back (happens a lot in videogames) and thought, you know, this is a job you'd love and something feasible.

Went to the shop bought one of the Missing Manual series about making sites, plus the Visual Quickstart guide to HTML (Which I don't recommend at all - I ditched that in favour of O-Reilly, APress Beginner's CSS and the W3C schools).

Since then I've made my own site, two for friends, one for a guy living in France (who has strangely opted to keep his awful comic sans table based site) and I'm currently re-working my own site so that it's less informal.

I love it to be fair, it's something I do for pleasure, which I hope will equate at some point into the future as a viable career.

How I started..oh god..hard to tell, as I see webdesign only as one part of it.

I did graphic industry back in the dawn of time, and set lead types by hand, retouched on film, stood over glaring light tables; scalpel in hand... I messed up printing presses; I fiddled with the first macs and pagemaker. I did an apprenticeship in bookbinding and restoration, I worked in a printing business, I worked on pc support, I worked with hi-tech instruments for marine research...

 

..and now, I have finally found my way back to school where I belong - typography, digital design, and learning to code by hand. Enjoying every minute of it.

I am happy for the background in "manual" design; for the sense of shape and form that gave me - making sketches by hand and pieces of paper and all that.

I guess mine is a diffrent road!

When I started out learning HTML and CSS I used the Adobe resources a fair bit, just going through the tutorials helped a lot, and because they show you the best practice, and how to stick to web standards, you don't pick up bad habits that will plague you in future.

 

http://www.adobe.com/support/

Around 18 I started playing on Geocities, then found http://www.htmlgoodies.com/ (which was way better back then, by the way) and started using "view source" to see what people were doing and learn how to do it too. That lead me to go to school for computer programming, which did not focus on web development apart from ASP and JSP. Within the past couple years I got back into web design, learned CSS, XHTML, PHP, MySQL, and Photoshop. Within the past year or two I have been diving deep into usability, interface design, information architecture, JavaScript, Ajax, and Dojo.

I loaned a book on HTML from the library. Sat down, read it all, went to my computer, opened notepad, made a site with a black background and white text, changed the colours of links and thought that the title tag was the coolest - it changes part of the BROWSER! Wooo....

 

OMG I REMEMBER WHEN I DISCOVERED THE TITLE TAG! And then you had javascript which could ~*animate*~ it and that was the coolest thing ever!

 

And then I learned how to make iframes so I could have areas that I would now make with a fixed height div. I moved away from iframes because the freehost I was on insisted putting ads at the top of each page. LOL.

A bunch of us gym moms were sitting around watching our kids train, complaining that we never found out about important things when we needed to know them and saying that we really needed a website for the gymnastics club, so I decided to take the bull by the horns, went to the head coach/owner and said that if she would let me use her club as a guinea pig, I would make a website for her and learn how to do it as I went along. So I got a hold of Dreamweaver ... the club now has a website that everyone really likes and depends on, and I fell in love with web design. So I learned HTML, CSS, etc, retired from my 31-year long high school math teaching career with a pension, and registered my new web design and development business.

It's best to start with the basics, get some decent books and work on lots of tutorial online. You should try to code to the standards set out by the W3C

 

Mahesh

www.multimediaforlife.co.uk

http://www.sitepoint.com/books/html1/

 

this book