Web design is quite a complex field, and if you want to learn how to design great looking websites, it will take a lot of work. The first thing that you need to consider is whether you want to be a full-service web, designer. Creating websites from the ground up is time-consuming. Do, you want to work on a specific aspect of website design, coming up with layouts, doing graphic design work, making themes for popular content management systems, or creating static HTML layouts.
Web design has become more complex, it is common for the front-end and back-end work of website design to be separated. We think it is best to split them into two or more different tasks, with programmers handling the back end, graphic designers supplying the images, and web designers doing the front end code. We will be looking at the front end of this introduction.
Key Technologies
Web sites these days rely on HTML5 for their essential layout. This is a simple but effective form of markup that will allow you to put together great looking websites.
HTML5 describes WHAT should be on a website. To describe HOW that content should look you would use CSS (cascading style sheets). These describe the size of the text on the screen, its color, the color of the background, how links are decorated, and how the page layout should look.
To describe how the page should behave, and make things interactive, most designers use a JavaScript library such as JQuery. This is something that allows your website to accept input, perform calculations and checks on it, and send it back to the server, without requiring a screen refresh.
Learning Those Technologies
If you are interested in learning those technologies, then you should use something like CodeCademy to practice coding. This free service will help you to learn the basics of website development, without having to waste a lot of time on setting up a development environment. You can also take advantage of free lessons designed by experts in the field.
Theming Existing Websites
In addition to creating static websites from scratch, it is a good idea to learn how to theme existing websites. WordPress, for example, is a hugely popular content management system that powers quite literally millions of websites. If you know how to create themes for WordPress, then you will be in a good position to sell your work to a large audience of people.
Building themes is easier than designing a website from scratch because you have some basic elements and structure to construct. However, you have to understand the framework that the WordPress (or other content management system) developers have provided. This may take a while, and it is a good idea to make a few themes just for fun. It is best to try to understand what you are working on so that you don’t end up in a situation where you release a theme for public use. Only to find that it breaks when the person installs a plugin or updates their website.
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