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How to design a professional website?

This post has been created from the recently ditched forum… it was one of the few good discussions. Most discussions are held within the groups email list. Join the group on Meetup.com for details.

Steve, Web Designer – wrote

How can i design a good professional qualified site? is dreamwaver required? Any softwares required? How much programming languages required? is 2d or 3d required? Please answer these and also tell the best place to learn webdesign online.

REPLIES

Paul of http://www.webdesignandmarketing.com.au replied…

This day & age there are many good & easy website builders that are available to deign & maintain a good professional website. wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) website creators & editors are very simple & depending on the actual builder can be very flexable to customise as to your liking. Look & trial a few as some are very restrictive also. Remember to keep it simple as most websites are far to busy & confusing this won’t keep the attention of the searcher & you might loose them.
Paul Furlong

renegade.sk wrote

There are so many tutorials online that you can learn just about anything if you know where to look. There are also hundreds of tools to help people make websites faster, and if you’re starting out you can make some very basic things with Google sites that do the job.

If you want to start making your own sites, I’ve taught myself web development and design online and these are some of the best resources that I use:

Tutorials
– W3schools – first and foremost this is where I started
– Flashtuts
– PSDtuts
– Photoshop lady
– Nettuts
– Tutorialized
– Hv-designs

General Web stuff
– Web design depot
– Webappers
– Hongkiat

Content Management Systems
– Typo3
– WordPress
– Joomla
– Drupal
– Text pattern CMS
– Outlaw Design Blog

This should be enough to get you well and truly started. Read heaps and do loads of tutorials. Good luck!

GusRuss89 of www.arwebdesign.com.au replied

Hi Steve,

I would recommend Dreamweaver yes, it has a good visual/design side. You can find lots of tutorials for using Dreamweaver online I’m sure.

You should also try to get an understanding of HTML and CSS, W3Schools is probably the best place to start, but if you are looking for a particular piece of code, you could quite easily just google it.

As for design principles, this is something you should research thoroughly before you start. Look into designing for usability in particular. Even just have a look around at similar sites to what you want to develop and take note of their layout, colours etc.

You should also look into using a Content Management System (which makes it easier to update, and helps you create the site). The post before this one lists pretty much the best ones. I believe WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are the most popular.

Hope this helps

Angus

Then some spam 🙂 – ignored.

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Author: Ben Maden

Web consultant at Matter Solutions. Matter Solutions provides Website Design, Custom Web Development, Magento Ecommerce, SEO, SEM, SMM and full range of Website Consulting services to help clients get the very most from their investment in doing business online. Follow on Twitter