Web Design Questions

[panicbird]

For the tech-heads among us,

I am interested in learning web design. I know a little HTML, but not enough to do anything particularly useful. I would like to learn to use a good editor, preferably not one which requires a lot of by-hand editing. Which ones would you recommend? And with that: which books, online tutorials, etc. would you recommed for me to learn how to use the recommended editor? I have seen Dreamweaver recommended before; is it any good/worth the price?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Semper Fidelis]

If you're serious about it then Dreamweaver would be the best choice. If you have home-schooled kids you should be able to get the academic price.

As for books, there are books that are called "Bibles" that are pretty decent for Dreamweaver and HTML.

Here's a free one: http://www.w3schools.com/html/

There's no shortcut to this stuff Lon. I've been coding pages using Dreamweaver for about 11 years and certain things just have to be learned by spending many hours tweaking to get things the way you want.

I've also retreated more and more from straight up HTML sites and gone more to CMS type sites like I did for http://www.cpjournal.com using Wordpress or http://www.solideogloria.com using Drupal. My HTML skills are still needed there but once I've laid out the template it's reallly easy to use.

 

[Southern Presbyterian]

I have had much success with this little program...

SiteSpinner

It is a WYSIWYG program, and for the price, beats Dreamweaver hands down. in my opinion.

As for books, I learned form HTML Goodies and Web Design in a Nutshell. And am still learning.

 

[Davidius]

I also recommend Dreamweaver.

And I think you should get a book on Cascading Stylesheets (CSS). They're used in almost every website today and being able to do them is invaluable. Huge, beautiful websites can be created entirely in CSS if you know what you're doing. You might want to look into something like Java or Perl as well, and maybe Flash for object-oriented stuff (moving around images instead of typing code). Flash can be used to create whole webpages or individual components to pages created in HTML and CSS.