Website Design

My site-design is shocking. I can't design a half-decent website if I worked at it for 15 hours a day for 3 months. I can code/program alright but anything design oriented is a disaster. How can I get better at designing sites? I've tried modifying templates to no avail, ynori7 gave me some good advice to take stylesheets from a good-looking site and to modify it/learn from it but I just can't learn! Is there any tutorials or good practices that will help me to learn? Thanks, Conor

Take a webdesign class. I'll be taking one next school year.

Dreamweaver comes with some really good tutorials. If you don't have the money for dreamweaver, torrent it. I got a torrent with Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, all of them 7th editions in one torrent.

Look at sites you think are attractive. Then, go to Paint, or Photoshop and make some basic outlines for how you would incorporate that into your own site. From their try coding your CSS.

Keep it simple. Many of the best looking sites are good looking because they are simple. Go ahead and post some of your attempts. I'm sure some of us will comment and try to help you out.

Another really basic way to get started is to find a template of a free Creative Commons web design, then take a screenshot of the main page and do your best to replicate that from scratch. The images, layout, code, and everything along the way should be done by you, from scratch. Along the way, start giving it your own person touch if you think up some good ideas.

Also, I'm pretty sure that by doing that it's yours, which means you can legally remove any of those "Designed by so and so" links. I'm not positive, though.

The way I learned was starting from photoshop, to make the design. Then, moving to notepad to write out the basic design with <DIV>. Use those rather than a table. You can customize them much more than a table. Though out the design process, there will be alot of editing and changing sizes. Just make sure, If you don't think it looks right, it probably isn't.

If you want some extra help, add me on which ever messenger you have.

yours31f wrote: The way I learned was starting from photoshop, to make the design. Then, moving to notepad to write out the basic design with <DIV>. Use those rather than a table. You can customize them much more than a table. Though out the design process, there will be alot of editing and changing sizes. Just make sure, If you don't think it looks right, it probably isn't.

If you want some extra help, add me on which ever messenger you have.

I think I'm speaking for quite a few people when I say that you can't help anyone with webdesign.

Download the latest Adobe Photoshop, go on pixel2life.com or something stupid like that, and look up some web design tutorials for photoshop. Photoshop is easy, way easier then programming. If that won't work, well… some people just aren't born with designing skills.

-Bizzare- wrote: Photoshop is easy, way easier then programming.

Almost always, Design skills are hard for programmers, where Programming skills are hard for Designers. It's a terrible, terrible situation.

Also, please watch the date of posts before you post. This one is actually quite old, and you bumped it.

When I'm at work I usually just google image something random. It has to pertain to my site subject of course, but otherwise it's just inspiration. Just looking at images can spring little ideas for colors, shapes, or anything really.

Following the basic design of most of the sites I work on is

body

header div logo/image buttons div /header div

content div /content div

footer div /footer div /body