I always find it to be easier when there are some good guidelines to follow to feel free to give me some tips.
Anyway, designing websites isn’t what I primarily intended to be about but then then I realized that running websites will be a lot easier if I master the design.
Like the Chinese saying goes, give the man a fish, you fed him for one night, teach him to fish, you fed him for his entire life.
Anyway, first of all, what programs are most useful? I’m guessing Adobe Flash and Photoshop are a must. Dreamweaver as well? What exactly is the difference between Dreamweaver and Fireworks? What does Illustrator do?
Also, how important exactly is coding? I know it might sound like a stupid question since it’s clearly very important but what I wanna know is how far can you get without really knowing it like the back of your hand? I understand there are a lot WYSIWYG applications these days so I figured, maybe, I will be able to do a thing or two without the great knowledge of it.
Any good online tutorials? I’ve stumbled upon some. I especially like video tutorials.
The first, and most important rules I learnt when I first started designing a web site is:
1) Set your page to standards-compliant mode, otherwise it won’t display correctly in IE. This may seem obvious, but unfortunately I learnt this rule first time the hard way.
2) Never design a website using IE as a standard – as of IE 7, Microsoft’s browser did not conform entirely to web standards. Make sure your design appears correctly in Firefox, Opera or Safari first, as these are more web standards-friendly, and then you can apply fixes afterwards to take care of IE (Google “IERoot” for some advice on tweaking for IE)
A graphics package if you are wanting to design anything (e.g. Photoshop)
Flash if you want to make animations (IMO its not a must)
Dreamweaver is a WYSIWYG site creator, so if you want to create websites badly you could use that I guess.
Fireworks is a graphics package, not sure why your compairing it to dreamweaver.
Illustrator is a vector graphics package.
IMO coding is really important, but i’m a programmer so I guess thats kind of an expected answer from me. You can get along okay with knowing your way around WYSIWYG programs pretty well, but it’s always better to have something hand coded IMO.
There are loads of tutorials out there on pretty much everything you asked about, I could list a whole load, but that would take me a lot of time and I have other things to be doing, so it’s not going to happen.
