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Inuyasha
07-21-2005, 11:03 PM
I will tell the honest truth. I suck at web design. I have been using freewebs for so long and now I want to actually make my own layout....but I really dont know how to. I've tried to but I cant. Can somebody help me?
DCElliott
07-22-2005, 04:38 AM
There are two facets to visual web design -
(1) achieving with the use of color, shape, imagery and fontography a site that is true to its purpose and enhances the user's experience
(2) coding the site in such a manner that it accomodates a wide range of user capacities both in terms of equipment, educational level, language, and possible disabilities.

We are not all top-notch graphic artists, but that should not keep us from employing colors and images in our pages. Most of the advanced users here use a more formalized form of HTML called XHTML - it gets rid of a number of older codes (so there are actually fewer codes than for regular HTML) but requires stricter application of coding rules (closing all tags, proper nesting of tags, all tag information in lower case, etc.) XHTML in combination with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the modern way to code web pages. If you want to see the effect of stylesheets, just put <link rel="stylesheet"
href="http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/Core/Oldstyle.css" type="text/css"
title="W3C Oldstyle Stylesheet" />into the <head> section of one of your documents (but it can't have any <font> tags in it which overrule the styles). This is one of the stylesheets created by the World Wide Web consortium and you can view a number of their sheets at: http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/Core/preview . It doesn't take much to add a little pizzazz. For a wilder take on variations on stylesheets, Css Zen Garden (http://csszengarden.com/) is a famous site where authors have submitted various stylesheets to be included in the demonstration. In both examples, thw W3C and Zen Garden, identical HTML files were used, only the styling was changed.

If you want to learn more, there are many folks who can help, providing, of course, you are willing to do a lot of reading, experimenting, and searching for information on your own - there is no spoon-feeding available here.

Good Luck.

DE
Inuyasha
07-26-2005, 12:04 AM
Okay. I'm still confused but I'm just going to get adobe. But are there any cheaper photo editors? Seriously. How much does it cost to edit some photos?
Terminator1138
07-26-2005, 05:10 AM
Paint shop pro is cheaper...the GIMP is free...many alternatives...too many to list and I think there is a thread discussion on them also.
Inuyasha
08-01-2005, 10:21 PM
Ahh. But photoshop is better then gimp and psp right? I already have psp anyway.
Terminator1138
08-02-2005, 05:00 AM
Photoshop is the Cadillac of digital art and photo editing.
animgirl
08-04-2005, 06:02 AM
Inuyasha, are you looking to edit photos or get into web development?

Yes, Photoshop is the Cadillac of digital art and photo editing. However, I wouldn't suggest it as your first car. If you're new to the digital design/web development arena, I would suggest you try working and learning with the tools you currently have, or free tools such as GIMP that can give you a taste of what this is all about.

See, Photoshop is only a program and doesn't come with any premade creativity or knowledge of web development. It does enable the user with better tools for creating, but doesn't teach you how to create. The key is learning to create. The same design principles are present no matter what program you work within, it's just a matter of experimenting. I wouldn't suggest going out and "getting adobe" because you're interested in web development.

Aside from this, a digital design program is only part of the design puzzle. As DC noted earlier, it takes a combination of coding and graphic design to make a cohesive whole.

I guess it's all just a matter of time assessment. Are you looking to really dive in, or are you just curious?
PsychoticDude85
08-04-2005, 06:19 AM
A Decent GIMP hack is GIMPshop, it uses all the GIMP tools and is still free but reorganises them to be more user-friendly like Photoshop

http://plasticbugs.com/index.php?p=241