Learning to design a website

I may have mentioned this before, but if not, I will do so again, if you want to learn to design a website, the best way is to hand code.

There are many open source and paid website design software options available, but, they all have their problems. Serious professional website designers don't use Dreamweaver, Coffee Cup, or, possibly the greatest sin against website design ever, the Microsoft FrontPage and Microsoft Publisher options.

I won't go into the Microsoft issue any more except to say that if you want a website to have thousands of lines of crappy code, take forever to load, and just be a total stuff up in anything except Internet Explorer, use them.

I learnt to code the log hard way, and developed several bad habits along the way. It's only in the past year or so that I have been getting these things out of my system.

First of all, if you want to design a website, you need to know, at minimum, HTML and CSS. Just enough to get by is not enough, a bit more than that is dangerous. So, your first task will be to familirize yourself with these two coding practices.

I'm going to give you links to sites that offer good learning material.

I'm going to give you a link to a wonderful tutorial. It is a bit dated, but working through the tutorial, step by step, will do more for you than any other software or tutorial resource I have found.

While scratching around in Google, I typed in:
"how to design a website for free"

The results were less than encouraging. The site that heads the list, is, in my opinion, and apologies to the owner, a bit of a waste of time. Apart from offering FrontPage tutorials, you really have to scratch around to find anything useful.

Further down, well, not good. 'nuff said.

I changed my search term slightly to:
"learn how to design a website for free"
and the only site of note, and one I would recommend is the w3schools site. I often use it to check things. Not as good as w3c.org, but not as technical, and easier to navigate.

At this point I stopped. I had spent over 2 hours browsing, and didn't find what I was looking for. At this point, let's not waste time, go straight to the Subcide website.

This is the tutorial I mentioned earlier.

The tutorial is a bit old, but remains a gold nugget. Using the tutorial assumes you have some knowledge of HTML and CSS. This you will get from w3schools.

My recommendation is to concentrate on HTML4, and CSS2. XHTML, from what I can glean, will be dying when HTML5 is introduced as a w3c supported standard. CSS3 is, as yet also not fully supported.