Web Design

Dreamweaver is made by Adobe. Same thing.

You will not get wizards or step-by-step tutorials with Dreamweaver. You'll have to design from scratch. Nowadays designers probably use more blogs/wordpress/applications/etc. to make sites, then port in the information.

Any good design company should be able to make the site for you and hand it over so you can just update it easily with Dreamweaver or online.

 

You don't design anything from scratch anymore, it is a waste of time. Use some kind of framework to build the site on, like WordPress (blog/website) or Drupal (content management).

For 99% of small businesses installing WordPress, then purchasing and editing a premium theme is all they need... and as someone who works on small business websites all the time, please stay the hell away from GoDaddy.

http://www.wordpress.org
http://www.themeforest.net

 

Jerk.

 

I mean he can, but there are platforms to build upon... someone's already done all the leg work (and it's free), why reinvent the wheel?

Hell, http://www.whitehouse.gov runs on Drupal.

 

I've used SquareSpace for a couple of projects. Extremely easy to develop with and I was able to train an admin to update the site in 30 minutes.

http://www.squarespace.com/

 

Joomla is great too, easy and powerful.

 

GoDaddy has changed a lot, and for the worse. Simply creating a MySQL database on there can take up to 45 minutes to process, it really sucks.

WordPress is a blogging platform. Kind of like vBulletin (which ClutchFans) runs on is a forum platform. Both of them are written in PHP, they just have different functions. Drupal, which I also mentioned is a CMS or content managment system platform written in PHP as well. A CMS is just an "all encompassing" platform, where your ideas aren't really limited, where as a blogging and forum platform are limited some. PHP is a web language, like HTML but more robust.

WordPress is the most used and most mature blogging platform on the internet. It has a huge community of people that create plugins, widgets, themes and all kinds of other cool little things to improve it. When you create a WordPress site, it automatically looks like most normal sites. Here's a link to WordPress set up with it's basic "2012" theme, and content (read: words, pictures, data) entered in.

http://twentytwelvedemo.wordpress.com/

Looks like an every day website right? So it takes a lot of the leg work out of it. Now, here's the same WordPress blog using a different "theme."

http://delicacydemo.wordpress.com/

As you can see, simply changing the theme completely changes the look and feel of the website. Here's a list of all kinds of free themes for WordPress.

http://theme.wordpress.com/

Premium themes are just themes created by designers who sell them for usually about 25-50 bucks each. They generally have a lot of "extras" that come with them.

ThemeForest which I mentioned earlier is an open marketplace where thousands of artists list theirs custom themes for purchase. Just Google "WordPress Theme," there are tons of places to get them.

 

This is certainly a good option for basic sites if you want to take the hands off approach.

 

I would recommend using wordpress. Maybe get one of those professional themes. It isn't too hard to setup.

 

I am currently working on a website for my small business, so I can probably give you some relevant information that will help you spend less time than I did learning what I needed.

First of all, if you have never built a website before, it would be extremely wise for you to buy a book on html and css. This, I would recommend, even if you decide to go with a web designer, framework, content management system (Drupal, Wordpress, & Joomla!) or a software suite like Adobe Dreamweaver.

Without a solid understanding of html and css, you really would be wasting your time with any of the aforementioned solutions. There are several good books on HTML/CSS, but the book I recommend is Head First HTML and CSS. The good thing about this book is that it was just released in 2012, so the examples are up-to-date and fresh, it's extremely thorough and, most importantly, easy to follow.

Beyond that there are several directions you can take, depending on what your needs are, and what you intend your website to accomplish. In addition to your particular aptitude with code.

{My personal opinion: stay away from Dreamweaver.} I say that because with Dreamweaver you are going to have to learn more than simply html and css to get something accomplished with it, which is probably too much to much to do for what I am guessing will be for 1 website. If you were playing to make a career out of it, then give Dreamweaver a try.

Secondly. Content Management Systems. What are they? And, why should you care? First of all, a content management system is a way to organize your web content in such a way that pages are built from the snippets of content you store on files in a datebase (usually, a mysql database). Because content management systems are database driven, you have an admin side (where you manage the site) and a client side (your web page).

What's important to understand about a content management system is that it is essentially a graphical user interface. It does nothing to help you create a website at all. It only provides tools that allow you to interact with a mysql database. However, that being said, one of the benefits of using them are the massive amounts of 3rd party vendors who help you create a website in minutes by providing templates, shopping cart programs, and little widgets of all sorts to interact with these programs to get a site up and running fast.

Another solution is the so-called frameworks. Twitter Bootstrap is a framework, and so is HTML5 Boilerplate. What are frameworks? Essentially a framework seeks to provide a jump start on coding by compiling a set of css, and javascript files that helps your html code look consistent across multiple browsers. What's great about frameworks are the fact that the hard coding is done for you.

Another way to look at this is: while Content Management Systems seek to help you interact with databases more easily, frameworks help you interact with your html to make you content cleaner and easier to manage. For that reason, many high end templates that are built for Joomla!, Wordpress and Drupal, implement Twitter Bootstrap so that you can more easily code your webpages with css while at the same time gaining the benefits of a content management system which, again helps you to have a dynamic website because of the database driven approach.

Conversely, frameworks are hardly any help whatsoever with shopping cart programs, session management, etc. Frameworks are only a set of related styles for css.

If you take the approach of buying a Joomla or Wordpress template that uses Twitter Bootstrap, you might ask yourself are there any disadvantages to this approach, and the answer would be yes.

First disadvantage. Templates are, by their very nature, cookie cutter solutions, and as such they take an expansive (some might call: bloated) approach to design. There are so many styles that are coded into the templates that they are bloated and thus less efficient than a custom web page would be. Content Management System don't help this either. Everything is slower with content management system.

The other problem with a content management system is that, if you really do want to customize your webpage, it is difficult because a Joomla site (as with the other type of sites) carry a footprint in the way that they render webpages. It just isn't going to look as cool as with a custom design. Adding to this problem is WEB DESIGNERS themselves are using these templates to avoid creating unique solutions for their customers.

If you want a custom web page, you need to understand what to ask a web design so that you don't pay 2500.00 for a site that you could have built for less than 100.00, if you bought your own template.

Finally, as if I haven't spun you around enough, if you really want to do this right, you are going to have to learn two other things beyond html and css, and that is: PHP and SQL. What is this? Both are programing languages, SQL interacts with your database and PHP translates that into something what web browsers can use to to build web pages.

The main advantage of learning php and sql is that often you cannot find a 3rd party solution to solve the specific demands of your company. For example, I am currently needing to build an appointment scheduler that allows me to validate vin#'s. First of all, most appointment setters don't allow for you to store vin#s. Second of all, even if they did, many of them don't allow you to hook into their problem with custom SQL queries that you can use to do meaningful things with the data stored.

A book I would recommend, if you decide to take the plunge, like I did, is: PHP & MYSQL from Novice to Ninja by Kevin Yank. Another Book: Simply SQL by Rudy Limeback is another book I'd recommend.

Beyond that, terms and things you need to look up: JQUERY MOBILE, RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN. If you want to optimize your web page for mobile devices. The last thing I'll say, is that JavaScript and JQUERY I would not worry about these things right off the bat. They are cool and all, but since most dabblers in web design learn this first there are many examples of code that learning these languages, at least right off the bat, is not mandatory. Concentrate on PHP, that's the money language.

 

on a related note, are any one of u good at designing sites (or can recommend anyone)? My church is looking to redo their site, and they want someone with some experience to do the initial build.

 

How big is your church and what's the budget. To get a truly unique design done right costs thousands, don't trust anyone who quotes you less... they're probably stealing the design from somewhere.

Here's a list of "non profit" aka religious-based WordPress themes on ThemeForest as cheaper alternatives. Most people get a custom theme, and then customize it more with their colors, logo, etc... so it is still unique, just not entirely unique.

 

250-600 people.

I don't know if we need a truly UNIQUE site but i would think the most they would want to spend is <$2500.

http://www.ipchouston.com/ipc/index.php

the blog doesn't look too bad. Def not unique.
http://ipchouston.com/blog/

 

If you have your own graphics already, 2500 might get you there, but it won't be easy. A good graphic designer for logos will cost you 1000+ alone.

 

Hmm. Could a graphic designer + professional wordpress theme work and be more cost effective?

 

Yes, that is a good way to go. But a framework + graphic designer would be better as far as uniqueness, but then you sacrifice content management tools.

 

Well then anyone know any affordable graphic designers?

 

go to logopond. It's where all the good designers hang out.