Web Design help

Josh Miller , the best tool for learning is a good text editor and Treehouse videos. I'm not going to get on the Dreamweaver good/bad debate. But in my opinion all those tools are still limited by your knowledge of what those tools are doing. Understanding what those tools are doing for you, makes it mush easier to use them ,troubleshoot them, and use them to their max. Even if you just learn the basics of handcoding html, css, and some javascript. Then start trying out tools like Dreamweaver if you really want. Otherwise, DW will not do what you want one day, you'l get frustrated because you don't know why, and then you'll either quit web development or finally decide to learn the basics.

try starting here: http://teamtreehouse.com/library/how-to-make-a-website

another story: If you only learn to use Dreamweaver, what if Adobe decides to stop developing Dreamweaver next year? There was a tool called SiteGrinder that built sites from Photoshop files. Worked pretty decently, even had a CMS that could be deployed with it. However all of a sudden we stopped hearing of updates, no one was getting support, the company went quite. A year after that started, the company shut down. I remember reading forum posts of people that had established their entire business model around using SiteGrinder and how they didn't know what they were going to do now. They were angry and frustrated. Problem is that they had called themselves a web developer when they were really a SiteGrinder user only. They had no understanding of the basics of web development and had no place to go. Soooo, just thinking about that when looking at learning tools first. Btw, that can be taken well beyond the world of Web Development.

Hi Josh!

A good way to start designing websites is find websites you like and take inspiration from them. Find a website that makes you say "wow" and then figure out what makes you like it so much. Once you have figured this out start incorporating these design choices into your own website.

The next step is to keep working on these sites that you are making and always try to think of ways that you can make them more aesthetically appealing and better looking. Once you have figured out some ways to make it look nicer incorporate them and then judge your website and see where to go from there.

I hope this was of some help to you, feel free to ask any questions if you have any! Have a good day!

• Luke

Hey thanks for the information. Definitely helps!

I have another question. To help design and code my website, I have been looking into Dreamweaver tutorials with HTML5 and CSS 3.

Is there a better program out there that can do this?