Designing, producing and maintaining web sites requires skills from many disciplines.
Keep these factors in mind as you learn or develop skills
- What are your areas of interest, training and aptitude?
- What are the skills clients and employers are seeking?
- What can you learn that will earn me the most income?
You Need Tools
Web design and production tools fall into two groups - desktop and online applications.
Adobe Creative Suite (Web)
This suite is the most commonly used packaged to create web sites. It includes applications which are considered gold standards.
- Dreamweaver
- Photoshop
- Illustrator
- Flash
- Fireworks
- Acrobat
Other Desktop Applications
A wide variety of other tools may also be needed. Many of these are single purpose applications that are inexpensive. Some are available at no cost.
- Web Browsers - use only current versions of Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera and others
- FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program - WS_FTP, Fetch or Transmit
- Text Editor - Notepad, Text/Edit, Text Wrangler, BBEdit (Dreamweaver can also be used as a text editor).
- Other single purpose apps such as Top Style (CSS Editor)
- Multimedia tools if needed. (podcasts, movies, animation, video screen capture)
Online Applications
Wide range of online tools to help you make web sites. Here are just a few of countless examples.
- Code validation services such as the W3C's HTML Validator, CSS Validator and Link Checker.
- Browsershots
- Font Tester
- Rounded Corner
Another type of online application falls under the category of Content Management System
You Need Technical KNow-how
People focus on either front end (what the user sees) or back end (server side) programming that handles data submitted from a web site.
Front ed skills can be subdivided into two kinds - design and technical.
Front End (Client Side) Technologies
- (X)HTML - Extensible Hypertext Markup Language
- CSS - Cascading Style Sheets
- JavaScript
Back End (Server Side) Technologies
- PHP
- MySQL
- ASP
- PERL
- Ruby and Ruby On Rails
- AJAX
You Need Skills
You may not need all of these skills but keep in mind that the web, first and foremost, is a text based medium. That means writing is skill number one!!
- Writing
- Coding
- Design
- Multimedia
- Programming
You Need A Process And An Approach
Your workflow process and your approach to web design is something that takes time to evolve. Best practices in web design embrace concepts like:
- web design standards
- modularity
- user-centricity
General Development Process
- Discovery
- Design
- Pre-production
- Production
- Launch
Template Development
Today's web design is centered on page that will serve as the template by which all other pages are made. There are 2 primary ways to do this.
- Photoshop Master to Web Page
- The Bud Kraus Method
You Need Server Space
The files which comprise web sites must be on a web server. Many different solutions are available and will depend on needs.
Keep in mind that you may wish to use a private web hosting service. These companies can provide customized services, usually at higher fees.
Servers run on Windows. Mac, UNIX and Linux operating systems/
Bud's Takeaways
Here are some resources to help you get started with learning how to make web sites.
- Joy Of code's Bookstore
A few of the books that taught me. - Joy Of Code's How To Tutorials
A few of my html tutorials. - HTML Goodies
One of the first web sites I used to learn HTML...and more.