I am looking for a resource from which I can learn (from the very basics) web page design. I have a couple of associates with small business who could benefit from having their work on display. Can anyone suggest a book or perhaps some online tutorials that will get me started.

Thanks

Are you after the actual ‘web design’ part of it? Or the coding of the said design? Though I suspect a bit of both leaning towards the code side….

erm… well… I need to take the process from start to finish, so whatever is involved in the creation and management would be necessary to learn. All advice welcome.

The easiest thing to do is to get hold of a copy of Dreamweaver. Latest version will set you back a few hundred quid, but old versions abound on ebay, etc. I did our whole site on Dreamweaver 3.0, which is about 10 years old, and it didn’t cause any significant problems: French Alps Mountain Bike Holidays

Since doing the original version of our site, I’ve learned a lot more about modern web standards etc., but my ancient version of Dreamweaver still seems to be able to deal with pretty much all of them.

I’ve also started to learn bits of Javascript etc., to be able to do things like the changing photos on this page: Trails Info Page

Dreamweaver is a bit like MS Word for web pages. There’s a menu option or an icon for all sorts of things that would take forever to learn how to code.

If you get a decent html book and use it in conjunction with Dreamweaver, you’ll figure out pretty quickly what DW is doing and be able to tweak the code in places to suit exactly what you want to do.

‘Modern web standards’…

Except it doesn’t even pass colour contrast guidelines, never mind anything else. 😉

admittedly I only used Dreamweaver briefly, many years ago, but I thought it dreadful 🙁

This is a good place to start

http://www.w3schools.com/

I’m a profesional web developer. Now I tend to spend most of my time writing Object Oriented code for back-end frameworks but, I also sometimes have to fill in the blanks WRT frontend. And we all had to start somewhere. Can I sincerely recommend that you start out with a text editor (wordpad will do) and a web browser, and take yourself on a few tutorials. http://www.w3schools.com is a fantastic resource which I return to again and again for reference, whether it me XHTML attributes or XPath syntax it has most of the answers you’ll need.

As for ‘design’. Well I know nothing about that, and outsource to design houses for anything layout or design based. I don’t have ‘the eye’ for it.

I’m an Architect by trade so hope i have ‘the eye’, links duly noted, thanks everyone.

And you also have to consider the usability, accessibility and functionality of a site. Aside from the technical prowess and visually arresting power of a site, it has to fill user requirements. Consider user profiles and scenarios – ie choose several different imaginary potential site users and consider what they will want to find on the site and how they wil access it.

Website design isn’t, as some think, dead easy just because you have some software bundled on your computer

I’d say it’s best to learn to do this properly. Read “Designing With Web Standards, 2nd edition” by Jeffrey Zeldman to learn how and why “proper” design is important. http://www.zeldman.com

Keep things simple and clean, some good examples:
[list]
[*]http://www.markboultondesign.com[/*]
[*]http://www.andybudd.com/links/well_designed_css_sites[/*]
[*]http://www.redfred.co.uk (admittedly my company’s site…)[/*][/list]

Dreamweaver and Photoshop are good starting points. If you don’t really want to spend time learning to design pages as Zeldman would suggest, you can design using ‘tables’ which images and text can just be drag’n’dropped into, although this isn’t what tables are supposed to be used for. Good luck!