Web design studies- looking for some advice...

[jazbug5]

Okay; been umming and ah-ing about doing an evening class here, and when I rang this afternoon to finally book, the last place had gone!

I am an illustrator/graphic designer to trade, but have been thinking I really need to add another string to my bow. I looked at various options, but what I want to do initially is to get a feeling for CSS and probably Dreamweaver (sorry techies, but I do design things to look pretty, and Photoshop is my staple programme).

I've tried just working it out through going through the tutorials in Dreamweaver, but I get bored very quickly, and it doesn't give me an overview of how everything fits in and works together. A local classroom evening course would have been great, but no beer until January.

So: does anyone know of any good, user friendly online courses? I don't mind paying for a decent one- this is my career, after all. Failing that, good book recommendations would be good- though I suspect that something with an element of interaction is going to suit me best.

Thanks in advance, guys...

Jaz

[NighthawkNZ:Me]

Okay; been umming and ah-ing about doing an evening class here, and when I rang this afternoon to finally book, the last place had gone!

I am an illustrator/graphic designer to trade, but have been thinking I really need to add another string to my bow. I looked at various options, but what I want to do initially is to get a feeling for CSS and probably Dreamweaver (sorry techies, but I do design things to look pretty, and Photoshop is my staple programme).

I've tried just working it out through going through the tutorials in Dreamweaver, but I get bored very quickly, and it doesn't give me an overview of how everything fits in and works together. A local classroom evening course would have been great, but no beer until January.

So: does anyone know of any good, user friendly online courses? I don't mind paying for a decent one- this is my career, after all. Failing that, good book recommendations would be good- though I suspect that something with an element of interaction is going to suit me best.

Thanks in advance, guys...

Jaz

The clinch was get bored easily, and if you got bored easily with the tutorials you most likely will with the online and books... thats where a class is better as you can ask the tutor and class mates questions and talk about it keeping your interest etc

However saying that there are heaps of book about... I'd try looking in the libarary (to those that don't know thats the place with heaps of books that you can borrow and then you return them 3 or 4 weeks later)

failing that Paper Plus and or Whitcolls and buy on for maybe around $50. problem is buying on you are stuck with it even if you don't like the authors style of teaching... (I had ended up with 3 books before I found one I liked)

My 5 cents worth

[jazbug5]

Cheers, fella... fair point about the boredom, I suppose. I am prepared to make some effort, though. It's just likely to be easier if it's a decent book or course, especially one geared towards leftfield ADD-ish visual types..!

Sadly my library was killed off (oh, sorry, it's being 'redeveloped' for two years) and the remaining tiny branches have very little on their shelves worth taking out. And when I DO takes books out (I read a lot, no TV for me) I tend to... er... forget to take them back. Ouchy.

[Big Dave]

HTFU and just learn it.
If you can dig PSD then you can suss html. Wuss.

[jazbug5]

HTFU and just learn it.
If you can dig PSD than you can suss html. Wuss.

But I'm AFWAID of the bigbadnasty html monster! *tries to look winsome*

[Big Dave]

But I'm AFWAID of the bigbadnasty html monster! *tries to look winsome*

Never seen manga with an eye patch.

2 days. All it will take you.

[Angusdog]

Try Lynda.com. I did the Illustrator one, about 13 hours of video all up, and it was superb. Loads fast (although you will need broadband), well thought through and covers ever aspect you need to know. In my case, I did the course about moving from Freehand to Illustrator. There is an enormous amount of material on their site, covering a huge range of software.

You may want to look at general web design, and perhaps the lessons concerning Dreamweaver, but I'd also recommend learning Flash. The basics are quite easy if you have a grounding in Illustrator, and it enables you to repurpose creative material for web banners.

Although it's a very good idea to widen your skill set, web design is becoming more specialised to the point where you either need to dedicate yourself to it, or just to the 'skin' or template for pages - which is fine by me. I find it all a bit fiddely and limiting, working in pixels and 20kb limits. I'm more comfortable with 150MB photoshop file or 40 page InDesign documents than the bandwidth-limited online stuff, although I do like knocking up a funky web bannner.

[Busy]

There are heaps of free HTML sites out there, hek I even have one (ezhtml.net) that I built about 7 years ago for folks. My site doesn't get into CSS much as works on HTML/XHTML
Books get very outdated and are often IE based (don't cover mozilla, opera, safari etc) and even a lot of HTML/XHTML/CSS wont work on all browsers. So find a book/site (or 3) that are not baised against any browser and instead of using everything from one source, read them all and pick out the bits that do it for you. Sites/books to avoid that contain such things as: using frontpage, using capitals in tags, not closing tags, IE based, lazy coding,

A good intro into CSS and even programming is tables (wait for it), tables are structured and gives an immediate effect that can be seen and hopefully understood sooner. Tables aren't easy thou but if you can work them out then the rest should all fall into place. Note tables will one day be phased out with CSS structures but are still valid XHTML

[Sanx]

I very much doubt tables will ever be phased out as they're very useful for organising data that should be in a table. But as structural design elements, they have pretty much been superceded by proper CSS mark-up.

OK. Some advice. Copy people. Download other's style sheets and learn from them. www.csszengarden.com is a good place to start, and there's a massive collection of tricks, hints and techniques on design-focused websites like www.alistapart.com.

Half the battle is not making something look nice, but making something look nice in multiple flavours of IE, Opera, Mozilla, Safari, etc etc. The add accessibility and small-screen rendering into the mix and you can get very confused (angry / frustrated / suicidal / homocidal - delete as appropriate) very quickly. Cross-browser compatibility requires all sorts of tricks and hacks, most of which other people have already found. You just need to go looking.

And, I'll even swap you a logo design for some personalised CSS help