Attention web gurus, need advice.

[z31maniac]

In an effort to further my career, make myself more marketable, and ultimately make more money as a Tech Writer I need to learn web/multimedia design.

Since I'm contract labor the company I work for won't pay for a class or school, so I'd like to start with teaching myself web design.

I'm contemplating buying Dreamweaver and putting it on my home PC to so I can learn do HTML and web page building.

Are there any good books, online resources, tutorials to check into? Is Dreamweaver the best software to learn on? Adobe's publishing suite seems to be the industry standard.

[george graves]

Lynda.com - Really great tutorials.

And yea, Dreamweaver is the standard. You not only need to learn web design, but also photoshop. As you'll be spending a lot of time there.

[kronus]

My approach has always been to learn the code and language itself, not get used to an IDE. (Like Dreamweaver, Frontpage, etc.)

I'm not clear on what you want to learn, though. Web DESIGN and web DEVELOPMENT are different. Web design involves making the page look pretty, usable, readable, intuitive, etc. Web development, on the other hand, is making the page work, move data in and out, etc.

If you're going for web design, CSS is pretty much the most important thing for you. It is your bread and butter. It makes 95% of the good-looking sites on the internet look good. Absence of it makes 95% of the bad-looking sites on the internet look bad. Dreamweaver will impede your abilities to make what you want, so I suggest you use a regular text editor.

Good books: O'Reilly HTML, O'Reilly CSS, O'Reilly PHP if you want to get into scripting.

[z31maniac]

^Then in reality, I need to learn design and development. Could you give me a little more input on why Dreamweaver would be more of a hinderance? Would it still not be a good tool to learn the fundamentals? I currently use XMetal as our doc design software, so I have a very, very basic understanding of rule structure.

george graves, yes photoshop is something I know I need but the software for it is much more cost prohibitive than Dreamweaver is. Unless, ahem.

[kronus]

^Then in reality, I need to learn design and development. Could you give me a little more input on why Dreamweaver would be more of a hinderance? Would it still not be a good tool to learn the fundamentals? I currently use XMetal as our doc design software, so I have a very, very basic understanding of rule structure.

george graves, yes photoshop is something I know I need but the software for it is much more cost prohibitive than Dreamweaver is. Unless, ahem.

ahem is a great solution for learning, then. Until you're actually making stuff that's going to be put into production, it's perfectly fine to learn on.

About Dreamweaver, I quoth to thee:

As a WYSIWYG Presto-based editor, Dreamweaver can hide the details of pages' HTML code from the user, making it possible for non-coders to create web pages and sites. A professional criticism of this approach is that it produces HTML pages whose file size and amount of HTML code is much larger than they should be, which can cause web browsers to perform poorly. This can be particularly true because the application makes it very easy to create table-based layouts. In addition, some web site developers have criticized Dreamweaver in the past for producing code that often does not comply with W3C standards, though recent versions have been more compliant. Dreamweaver 8.0 performed poorly on the Acid2 Test, developed by the Web Standards Project. However, Macromedia has increased the support for CSS and other ways to lay out a page without tables in later versions of the application, with the ability to convert tables to layers and vice versa.

Basically that means that DW makes crappy code. If you actually go into code and learn what it does and why, you'll be much better off. Ideally, you should be able to pop open the source code of a page, read it, and explain what it does. HTML is very simple markup, and CSS lets you do really cool things. They're both easy to learn to code properly, where Dreamweaver would obfuscate what you're trying to do.

As I understand, professionals that use DW typically go back and edit out all the junk it produces, a process that requires understanding what the code does.

You may want to check out A List Apart, Spoono, and the aforementioned books. All those were a great guide for me when I was learning web dev.

If you also want to learn web development, PHP is a very widely-used language that's very accessible. O'Reilly has a great book on it, too.

Another tip: after you have a basic grasp of HTML and CSS structure, get Firefox and this extension. When you see a page you like the design of, open up the extension's CSS editor, and mess around to see how the designer accomplished what they did.

[thull]

I was in the same bout as you a couple of years ago and just bought a couple of books to read about CSS coding and HTML. Along with searching the internet for tutorials (tons of free ones out there) I also used Dreamweaver's built-in templates and style guides as examples of how it is actually implemented.

The body that developed the standards in the first place is http://www.w3.org/ check out their guides and information there. Everything you need is listed from a technical standpoint.

For books "The Missing Manual" series is very good, and I have them for CSS, Dreamweaver CS3, and HTML. I would definitely recommend them as they are very good paper resources.

Otherwise, just google for html and css related terms and you will come acros a lot of info.

I use Dreamweaver CS3 as my main editor, but like was mentioned above it doesn't always produce the cleanest code. I typically will write the code by hand (a series of div tags with content, and then a style sheet for the layout of the divs) and then tweak it using Dw's tools. The great part about Dreamweaver is it's ability to keep track of the entire site and it's server, uploading and testing, etc. You don't need any other programs besides Photoshop for graphics and browsers for testing.