Website design

bloodyroarxx

My girlfriend is trying to update her website she knows HTML but nothing about current website design. Where should she start, what does she need to know such as programming languages and programs to help design it with.

admanb

What's she trying to get out of it?

bloodyroarxx

admanb wrote: »

What's she trying to get out of it?

Well she is an artist by trade, but she wants something more now as opposed to early pre-2005 basic html layouts

This is her current website she wants to be out of the simple table style it is now.

Nothing fancy like Flash or anything but she seems to need a primer on CSS she says and doesn't know where to start,

DrFrylock

Depends, what does she want to use the Website for?

I used to do my Website by hand in HTML, then HTML+CSS, then XHTML+CSS. But then the world changed, and now it's much easier/more flexible to use a very simple content management system. WordPress fit the bill nicely. I found a template online with a very flexible license that I liked to use as a starting point, and then I used my mad CSS sk1llz to modify it.

I don't think I had to write a line of (X)HTML for that; it was all CSS. I did a little work in Photoshop for the images and the background and the like. WordPress runs on PHP and MySQL and has some little dynamic features like a built-in blog and a relatively competent AJAX-y WYSIWYG page editor for the content. You don't have to know anything about PHP or MySQL to use WordPress, although if you know PHP you can write extensions for the platform. If I went and added a bunch of downloaded extensions to WordPress, I could go hog-wild with adding features, but mostly a little static content and a blog are fine for my needs.

NotYou

For an artist portfolio website, I'd suggest just using carbonmade.com. It's pretty amazingly easy to setup a portfolio. Free for a certain amount of pictures. A few bucks a month for unlimited pics and video.

Or she could just do the design, and then hire someone off the net to code it for her. It would be significantly easier than trying to learn how to code it properly. Unless she just has oodles of free time. Other than that, any book store has HTML for dummies and what not.

oracle

If she already knows HTML she can brush up on her CSS skills at www.w3schools.com. I don't think it's necessary to learn any PHP or Actionscript, especially since the future of Flash is rather shaky at the moment.

As somebody mentioned Wordpress is pretty easy to install, take a pre-existing template, and modify it to your liking, plus lots of plugins. If she doesn't already have it tell her to get Firebug for Firefox, it's a great tool for looking at CSS and figuring out what rules are coming from where and what you would need to change/override. Joomla is good too, it's more of a general use content management system. Wordpress can be used for whole websites but it's really designed to be blog software.

ransim

It really depends on what she wants out of the website. However I would recommend she looks into using a content managment system to get more bang for her buck. Many of them are free as long as you have a host that comes with a database and some will even have tools for setting them up easily.

If she's experienced in HTML she'd probably be ok with something like ModX. The CMS works around a basic HTML template, its very easy to use, there are also image gallery add ons already developed for it. As long as she knows basic HTML and CSS or can use dreamweaver she could use ModX.

For something more complicated there are others like Drupal, which also has add ons for image galleries and other items.

If she just wants a gallery, or a place to display her artwork there are more then a few options out there for free open source gallery software. I haven't used one in ages myself, but I've used Coppermine in the past. Another I came across in a quick search is GalleryCMS.

My only real comment is to try and avoid Joomla (its really just over complicated especially for a beginner).