starting to make a website...what all needs to be learnt?

[chow choppe]

Hi everyone

 

i am a 3d artist and want to get my website done. i have a domain name and the website looks crappy at the moment.i got it done from a young lad but i am not happy with the result.

Problem is that i dont have any knowledge in this field. i know flash a little bit only but have no experience in web design or programming.

I can hire someone to do it but its not fitting my budget and still i am not sure whether he will be able to make exactly what i want.

So i am thinking of trying it out on my own. I have time these days to learn also so why not try to jump into this field

 

Can u people guide me where to start from as a beginner and then move onto the next advanced level so that i should be able to make a good looking and creative website

 

Thanks A lot in advance.

 

Please guide

[Nic H]

wordpress is a good starting point with many templates and is very flexible, you may just need to learn a bit of css.

 

or you could try something like indexexhibit which is free and clean and very straightfoward, as used by alot of various artists.

 

http://www.indexhibit.org/

[bmcgonigle]

The easiest way for you to build your own site would be to use an out of the box solution like joomla, drupal or wordpress. All these are easily installed (usually offered from your hosted accounts dashboard), have numerous dedicated How To sites for questions & answers and you can install precreated site themes that can then be customized to your liking. All of these solutions come with easy to install plugins for contact forms, image galleries, etc. so it really makes life easy.

[brianzajac]

  3dsmaxed said:

Hi everyone

 

Can u people guide me where to start from as a beginner and then move onto the next advanced level so that i should be able to make a good looking and creative website

 

Thanks A lot in advance.

 

Please guide

 

With the advice mentioned above (going with Wordpress, Joomla, etc.), I would then suggest that you think of how to "connect" with potential clients / businesses who need you (i.e. ad agencies, real estate commercial brokers, or anyone who has a full suite solution and needs your services). Internet marketing is so crucial in the development of your site. Here are some things to think about. Keep in mind that many of these fields are done by professionals full-time. So don't try to master them:

 

1. Search engine marketing - if you've got a niche in 3D, exploit it by "translating" your site so Google, MSN/Yahoo can find you. Besides updating your title tags on each page, you need to...

2. Create relationships with other businesses online. Find sites that need 3D in their life (i.e. businesses that need you) and create online partnerships with that. An example that's worked for us is our 3D books and the partnership we have with CG Architect. Not only will this help online, but you'll start to establish relationships off-line.

3. Social media - don't get swallowed up by these services - Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Digg, etc. But do spend some time & get to know these areas. At the very least, you'll understand how the business of 3D works and get to know the major players out there.

4. Create an email sign-up list. I cannot stress how important this is. Keep your clients in the loop on what you're doing & they'll call you back for work later. Plus this is an easy way for potential clients to turn into clients.

5. If you need business now, try out Google paid advertising. It's much cheaper than print advertising too.

6. Make sure to add statistics to you site from the start. The longer your history is, the better you understand who's really coming to your site.

 

There are many other internet marketing systems out there. I hope these few will help put you in the right direction.

[anton]

As it was said previously, start with an out of the box solution like wordpress or joomla. You can find a lot of themes for both but most of the free ones will be poorly coded and not SEO (search engine optimization) friendly so my advice would be to start a theme from scratch. In my experience, wordpress would be the best choice for a beginner as you can find a lot more tutorials/resources out there and is a lot lighter and easier to manage than joomla. One drawback of using wordpress is that it was designed to be a blogging platform, not a full CMS (content management system) thus making a portfolio theme a bit harder to develop.

 

The only thing i would strongly suggest learning is CSS. It will make your life so much easier when developing any kind of website.

 

Here are a couple sites that i found very useful for both wordpress and css:

 

http://css-tricks.com - they also have a 3 part video tutorial on building a wordpress theme from scratch. A must see if you go with wordpress!

 

http://themeforest.net/ - nicely coded wordpress themes

 

http://net.tutsplus.com/ - web development tutorials

 

If you have any questions you can pm me too.

[brianzajac]

Although I haven't tried it yet, this looks like a good step-by-step process on making a basic site if you don't go with WordPress: http://psd.tutsplus.com/interface-tutorials/create-a-sleek-high-end-web-design-from-scratch/. It starts at the PSD stage & goes to coding in CSS.

[markf]

Dreamweaver appears to be an industry standard. It does cost a fair bit, however.

[Mau Fournier]

  markf said:

Dreamweaver appears to be an industry standard. It does cost a fair bit, however.

 

It also produces really bad/bloated code... But it is very easy to use!

[brianzajac]

  Mau Fournier said:

It also produces really bad/bloated code... But it is very easy to use!

 

I tend to disagree with this statement. However, if you are a beginner, it does add some extra code the more you use the WYSIWYG editor. As you get used to it & can start hand-coding yourself, it works out quite fine and is typically search engine friendly.

 

For me, bloated code comes from converting an MS Word document into an HTML page. I've personally reduced 3,000 lines (or more) of code from MS Word to 300 lines of code in Dreamweaver. Now that's some bloated code!

[Magnus_Alexander]

  Mau Fournier said:

It also produces really bad/bloated code... But it is very easy to use!

 

I also disagree with this... if there's an issue with bloated code, that's on behalf of the designer. If you have a good feel for what you're doing you can create extremely optimized code; it's just a matter of understanding. Dreamweaver's great benefit is that it provides a great interface for you to see what you're doing as you create the code. If you use code view and design view in conjunction with each other, you should have no problems; and you'll increase your understanding of how the code generates what you actually see in your browser.

[Mau Fournier]

  brianzajac said:

For me, bloated code comes from converting an MS Word document into an HTML page. I've personally reduced 3,000 lines (or more) of code from MS Word to 300 lines of code in Dreamweaver. Now that's some bloated code!

 

No disagreement there!

 

I respectfully disagree withe the fact that it is not bloated, though. It's the never-ending debate between DW'ers and us hand-coders, so it's a matter of choice.

 

But it's always unpleasant when we recieve a project from a client for maintenance, and it's filled with unnecessary DW code and bad layout solutions generated by that program. To me there's just no [quality] substitute for coding everything by hand, there's only faster and easier ways.

 

Like you said, the WYSIWYG editor and other automated features are what usually produce the worst code, but if you're going to work mostly hand coding in the code window, I just don't see a point to investing all that money to buy it. I can understand how someone could see the benefit, though, but I don't consider that a good ROI.

 

Like I said, it's a matter of preference, and it's a never-ending argument (over 11 years old, actually).

[anton]

Dreamweaver is an excellent program for beginners because of the design view. I learned html on it but once I had an idea on how to code by hand there was no turning back.

 

The code is a bit bloated, not as bad as a word generated document but keep in mind that Dreamweaver is a web design tool not a hyped up text editor that has the html output capability added as an after thought.

 

Open source programs like Notepad++ on Windows that have FTP capability and Firefox's plugin Firebug make web development a breeze, but you have to have some experience hand coding both html and css

 

Anyway, for a beginner Dreamweaver would be the right tool to use!

 

Now on the whole idea of building your site on your own. There are a lot of things that you should at least read about before starting doing it. First, you'll get yourself in the middle of a mess created by Microsoft with Internet Explorer 6, 7 and now 8 which you have to make sure your website displays properly in. Then you have the SEO part that is huge if you want free traffic from the search engines, google especially. And lastly, if you want any kind of interactivity, you'll have to get your hands dirty with javascript and libraries like MooTools or JQuery.

 

I'm not saying that cannot be done but don't take it lightly. Your project will hit roadblocks all the time but fortunately there is a large web design community that is willing to help.

 

My opinion is that you should create the complete layout of your website in Photoshop or Illustrator then find a service that would transform that layout in a full website for you. That way you have the full control over the design and the backend is done by a professional.

[wasteland giant]

  anton said:

*snip*

 

http://themeforest.net/ - nicely coded wordpress themes

 

http://net.tutsplus.com/ - web development tutorials

 

If you have any questions you can pm me too.

 

 

themeforest was quite nice. I checked it out last night and walked away really impressed. Cheap too. I'll be using it. Thanks.

[brianzajac]

  wasteland giant said:

themeforest was quite nice. I checked it out last night and walked away really impressed. Cheap too. I'll be using it. Thanks.

 

If you take a look at themeforest.net, you'll see it's part of the "Envato" network (look at upper-right corner to see all their networks). In the Envato network, I've started to use Flash Den. They have some killer flash components you can put into your HTML-based pages. I highly suggest sorting through that stuff because it can really put you ahead of the crowd in quality.

[chow choppe]

thanks for all the replies.

 

with mixed opinions its difficult to decide but i guess i would start with wordpress for now.

I had made a layout in Pshop as i didnt want to use a standard template.

So i was thinking if i can put animation to that layout to convert it to a webpage by somehow using dreamweaver or wordpress or anything else?

or its not that easy?

 

thanks

[brianzajac]

  3dsmaxed said:

thanks for all the replies.

 

with mixed opinions its difficult to decide but i guess i would start with wordpress for now.

I had made a layout in Pshop as i didnt want to use a standard template.

So i was thinking if i can put animation to that layout to convert it to a webpage by somehow using dreamweaver or wordpress or anything else?

or its not that easy?

 

thanks

 

Putting animation into a web site used to be a real PITA. Now we've got YouTube and other video sharing sites. I highly uploading animations that way (especially as a beginner) and integrating within your web site. Not only is it easy to do, but it doesn't suck up bandwidth + you get free marketing from YouTube / Other video sharing sites.