Your first website

[Siya Mava]

I just completed my very first website and quite frankly I am not happy. It looks amateurish; which is probably to be expected since I only just decided to move from being a copywriter to web designer. I have no experience with that or graphic design, I am teaching myself as I am moving along.

How long was it before you were happy with a design of yours?

My man, I have been blogging for almost 3 years now. I have never designed a website from scratch, all I do is download templates and tweak them to my satisfaction.
But i would just advise you to build a website that would satisfy it's audience more than you.

But I do wish you good luck. I'd also like to design a website from scratch, but at the the moment, time is just not on my side.

 

[_kabal_]

potatoes have nothing to do with chips

same logic

No, chips are made out of potatoes.

Bootstrap is a framework for consistent controls, typography and layout.

Bootstrap gives you a car, a box with 4 wheels. It also comes with a "sample" generic design. It doesn't design you an Alfa Romeo


People "design" tons of websites in bootstrap, yet they all look the same or are immediately identifiable as bootstrap sites

 

[rward]

bootstrap has nothing to do with website design

Bootstrap does have nothing to do with website design.

Well if you use the base css, it kind of does.

and

potatoes have nothing to do with chips

same logic

Bootstrap is a lot of elements that are functional, look good and speed up development.

I therefore want to expand into my next skill which would be either PHP or Javascript? Which is the next natural skill for me to acquire?

At this stage the question needs to be asked:
Are you wanting to do website DESIGN or website DEVELOPMENT?

If you want to do website development then go php or whatever.
If you want to do website design then do a design course.
If you're not naturally talented at design and you're not that good at picking out which colours go well together and how to make a page to look better then no amount of twitter bootstrapping is going to help. Perhaps concentrate on the development side for a bit and once you have that mastered and are getting a little bored of it, then move over to design.

If the development side of things isn't making sense to you and picking colours, layout, font styles, sizes and faces make more sense and is more fun for you then go for design.

If you're doing the dev thing, get a designer that you can work with.

If you want to be charging R30k upwards for a website and earning a decent living then that's the route you need to go. People aren't going to be paying that kind of money for a template that a couple million other companies around the world share.

You might have noticed people offering websites for between R2500 and R10k. I bet that 99% of them are template driven and no professional designer is involved in the process. The other 1% is shooting themselves in the foot.

The difference between a site designed by a professional designer with a couple years experience and a developer thinking they have it right is usually visually very noticeable, and about R25k.

If you think you are wanting to do both then think again really hard. There is lots that goes into development, loads of different frontend and backend technologies, each with different tools and frameworks.
Then on the design side there working with colour, working with layout, working with white space and the importance of it. Just fonts alone are a quick quagmire that the inexperienced can sink themselves into. Something as simple as a font can make or break a website.

I don't mean this post as discouraging or condescending or anything like that, just food for thought.

 

[francoisvr]

I don't mean this post as discouraging or condescending or anything like that, just food for thought.

On the contrary, I am not discouraged at all! If anything you have set my mind at ease and have given me some direction. I never expected this to be easy.

I make a very good living right now so I can afford to take the long road to where I want to go. I do have some feeling for the design side of things, which was why I wasnt completely happy with my first website.

I will eventually end up in the development side of this. I first want to be able to do a good job in the design side of things because before I delegate/outsource something I must be able to do it well myself.

 

[francoisvr]

My man, I have been blogging for almost 3 years now. I have never designed a website from scratch, all I do is download templates and tweak them to my satisfaction.
But i would just advise you to build a website that would satisfy it's audience more than you.

But I do wish you good luck. I'd also like to design a website from scratch, but at the the moment, time is just not on my side.

I can appreciate your advice, however I have plenty of time. I wont be accepting any new contracts until the new year so can afford to spend time on this.

 

[koeksGHT]

No, chips are made out of potatoes.

Bootstrap is a framework for consistent controls, typography and layout.

Bootstrap gives you a car, a box with 4 wheels. It also comes with a "sample" generic design. It doesn't design you an Alfa Romeo


People "design" tons of websites in bootstrap, yet they all look the same or are immediately identifiable as bootstrap sites

I was being sarcastic

I used bootstrap on ParcelCheck

I originally did my own CSS design but lacks that clean look and documentation bootstrap has making it an easier design choice. I love it but I do edit css as needed (use it as base)

 

[_kabal_]

I was being sarcastic

I used bootstrap on ParcelCheck

I originally did my own CSS design but lacks that clean look and documentation bootstrap has making it an easier design choice. I love it but I do edit css as needed (use it as base)

Nice work on making parcelcheck btw, super handy

 

[koeksGHT]

Nice work on making parcelcheck btw, super handy

Thanks! Mobile apps should be out soon now

 

[geogeek]

With notepad++ using bootstrap. I wont use bootstrap again, took me ages to figure out the css. That document was just crazy.

Bootstrap might be slight overkill for beginners without prior HTML & CSS knowledge, but don't give up on it just yet - it's excellent for building standards-compliant, responsive websites (which means that they'll scale and work well on mobile devices too).

You should also take a look at Foundation by Zurb - it's less complex than Bootstrap but still offers grid-based responsive layouts, and you could download and use the plain-CSS version so you don't have to worry about SCSS, mixins, and the more advanced CSS topics just yet.

Feel free to PM me if you have questions.

 

[geogeek]

P.S. I am trying to use a gradual focused approach to building my skills. I have a reached a stage with HTML and CSS that I will only learn more with experience and practice. I therefore want to expand into my next skill which would be either PHP or Javascript? Which is the next natural skill for me to acquire?

I'd say you should go for both PHP and JavaScript next - they can be complementary skills.

For JavaScript, find a jQuery tutorial (maybe on Udemy?) and work through it - it's very easy to use, but makes writing JavaScript so much less painful.

For PHP, install WAMP on your computer (I assume you're using Windows because you mentioned Notepad++ ?), then find online tutorials to lean PHP 5 and MySQL. Book-wise I recommend the Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide. It's not a very long book, and will take you from the basics of "what are variables and operators" to more advanced topics like how to work with databases and secure your web app.

Once you've done a few PHP and MySQL tutorials, download the Laravel framework - IMHO it's the best PHP framework currently available, and quite easy to learn. It's good to know how to do the basics in PHP (logins, database access, etc.), but once you know those a framework like Laravel will help you avoid writing the same old "boilerplate" code over and over for every project. Frameworks like Laravel have a lot of smart stuff around security, templating, etc. built-in, so all you'd have to worry about is defining your specific application's processes, not how to keep up-to-date with the latest in-depth security, encryption, and speed issues. If you're looking for books on Laravel, get Code Happy and Code Bright from leanpub.com.

Lastly, at some point you'll want to learn how to use a version control system, I recommend Git. A very simplified explanation of version control is that it allows you to "save snapshots" of what your project's codebase looked like at a given point in time. Say you only realized today that a change you made two weeks ago broke a related piece of functionality; instead of trying to remember / figure out what you changed, a version control system will tell you exactly which lines in which files changed, how they changed, and what your comments about the change were. Take a look at Github.com's video tutorials for a great introduction to Git.

If you have questions, feel free to reply here or PM me.

 

[francoisvr]

I'd say you should go for both PHP and JavaScript next - they can be complementary skills.

For JavaScript, find a jQuery tutorial (maybe on Udemy?) and work through it - it's very easy to use, but makes writing JavaScript so much less painful.

For PHP, install WAMP on your computer (I assume you're using Windows because you mentioned Notepad++ ?), then find online tutorials to lean PHP 5 and MySQL. Book-wise I recommend the Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide. It's not a very long book, and will take you from the basics of "what are variables and operators" to more advanced topics like how to work with databases and secure your web app.

Once you've done a few PHP and MySQL tutorials, download the Laravel framework - IMHO it's the best PHP framework currently available, and quite easy to learn. It's good to know how to do the basics in PHP (logins, database access, etc.), but once you know those a framework like Laravel will help you avoid writing the same old "boilerplate" code over and over for every project. Frameworks like Laravel have a lot of smart stuff around security, templating, etc. built-in, so all you'd have to worry about is defining your specific application's processes, not how to keep up-to-date with the latest in-depth security, encryption, and speed issues. If you're looking for books on Laravel, get Code Happy and Code Bright from leanpub.com.

Lastly, at some point you'll want to learn how to use a version control system, I recommend Git. A very simplified explanation of version control is that it allows you to "save snapshots" of what your project's codebase looked like at a given point in time. Say you only realized today that a change you made two weeks ago broke a related piece of functionality; instead of trying to remember / figure out what you changed, a version control system will tell you exactly which lines in which files changed, how they changed, and what your comments about the change were. Take a look at Github.com's video tutorials for a great introduction to Git.

If you have questions, feel free to reply here or PM me.

I am getting really good advice from the posters in this thread. Thanks for that and you will probably regret your offer before this is over

 

[minion]

wordpress.org

AGREED with DrJohnZoidberg! i started with Frontpage back in the days, then moved to Dreamweaver then to Wordpress. Best to start coding by hand. You can also play around with Joomla. But Wordpress is way cooler.