What are some good web sites or web designs that would be good for a beginner to start with that will be challenging but not really easy?
I was thinking about designing a blog with html and css and also a resume page or something along those lines.
Hi dabutler. Welcome to the forums. 
This is a tricky question to answer, but my suggestion would be to start by learning the basics of HTML and CSS, if you haven’t already, as this is important before launching into designs. Once i had read a book that laid out the basics of HTML and CSS, I went around and studied sites I really liked and looked at how they were constructed. A great feature of front end design is that you can loo under the hood at the HTML, CSS and JS to see how it all works, as most browsers let you both view the source code and come with developer tools that give you a more sophisticated view of the inner workings of the page.
Ya that is basically what i have done. I just want an idea of something i should create that wouldn’t be to hard but still a challenge.
What was the first website you created?
And thank you for welcoming me!
It’s hard to advise you on that. It’s best to work on a real project, though. Perhaps find a family member or friend who needs a website. That’s always a good place to start.
What was the first website you created?
Ha ha, like a few of the early ones I did, it is long gone now. Thank goodness!
ya, i think i am going to take a site that needs improving and just work on it for myself just to get better with html and css at this point
Ha ha, like a few of the early ones I did, it is long gone now. Thank goodness!
lol i mainly meant what types and kinds did you first make
O, right. Well, the first I created was one for myself, because I wanted to sell some products I had made. At that point, I really didn’t know about CSS and web standards etc. I only learned about them later, after wondering why many sites were so much better than mine!
The first paid job I did was for a small business owned by a friend of mine. That was after I had read up on CSS etc.
The first site I worked on was a personal site, a gaming community; which is where I learned the ropes really.
It was back in the 90’s, a UBB powered forum (based on Perl, brings back memories).
Doing things like:
- Creating custom skins taught me about design, html and later css.
- Installing mods manually and actually paying attention helped me to learn perl, as I started creating my own mods.
- Then extending to include a front site with news, walkthroughs, guides, game info, galleries and stuff
It actually taught me a lot.
My first real commercial site was a simple brochure style site for an art company. It had a very simple CMS where the studio could add images to the gallery on the front site and edit the text on the front of the site.
At the front is had a homepage with a simple “latest works”, an about page, a contact page and a gallery of pictures. You could also request a sale (as they were all original works it was 1 product, 1 possible sale of it); the customer would request the picture and the sale was made offline. It was a local company; a friend knew the owner so it was arranged through that channel; the owner asked my friend if he knew anyone who could do websites, my friend gave him my number and away we went.
I would say something like that is viable as a first project as its quite easy really but has a few simple challenges, like image uploads and loading content dynamically.
Or grabbing something like vbulletin or IPB, setting up a community and modding it, I learned a hell of a lot about how commercial applications work, standards and a heap of other things via that route. Well actually I learned about the W3C at the time from a guy who was helping moderate the forum. He was working for his state government (USA) on their websites and was hot on standards, so was beating me over the head to follow standards and do things properly lol.
I would start from the very start. Get HTML5 Boilerplate as a basic standpoint, and build the most standard of all sites. Start off with a home page with a big image on the top, a sidebar and a main content area. Then make a gallery section (which is just a list of images) and finally a contact form. Keep using as many online tutorials and “view source” of as many sites that do such things as possible to get ideas of how to build your site.
Some purists will say this is jumping in at the deepend - but if you get this nailed, you’re pretty much there with web design, then it’s just refining your skills.
If you need any help, feel free to drop me a line. Good luck!
That is basically why I wanted to start designing a website lol. After thinking about it though my original idea wouldn’t really work so after learning a little bit about web design i wanted to actually have some time of project to work towards. I have been trying to think of stuff that i would want and use. I know i wouldn’t use a blog cause that isn’t my thing but i know i could use a resume site at some point. So right now i don’t really have anything that i really want to make
Ya i think i’m going to do something like that if i can’t come up with something that i would really like to make
That could be a good place to start. There’s a lot you can play with on single pages, like different designs, scrolling pages, pages using other kinds of JavaScript etc. You could build a nice portfolio while experimenting like that.
So you guys know i haven’t given up on web designing yet lol I’m going to make a resume website and basically have all the elements that were discussed earlier in this thread
Also I picked up the missing handbook for css to learn more of about css before i started to build the website. So far i have wired framed the structure of the website and just expanding on how each page will interact and flow together.
Yes, that’s a good way to start. Now begin carefully to structure the pages with HTML and style with CSS, but get the basics right first. Feel free to show us your layout bit by bit and get feedback on how the structure is looking.
Sounds good i was actually hoping to do that lol i’ll probably be doing it once my exams are done in the next week but im looking forward to it!
Hey just to update I decided to go through with created the forum / ladder website and this has helped me learn a lot about how php and html work together is helping me learn how to edit css to get the style that i want and how to troubleshoot errors.
I plan on making the resume website once the forum is up and running.