Yet another blog post based on an email question … the email:

Hello Stefan,

I just got through watching your video on basic web design. Before I decide to purchase this beginning video I wanted to ask a few questions.

I am currently seeking alternate ways to generate income. I live in a small town type atmosphere and think maybe there is a future in business web site development. I have built a web site many moons ago using Front Page and it didn’t turn out half bad for not knowing exactly what I was doing.

My questions are:

#1. Is it possible to gain the knowledge to develop attractive beneficial web sites without obtaining a college degree in computer science?

#2. I realize that starting out with the beginner course is the starting point, but where will (or should) that lead?

#3. What is a typical cost for someone to hire a web designer? I don’t want to rake anyone over the coals but feel I should charge a fair affordable price.

#4.In the old days when all we had was dial-up, the key was to keep website design to a minimum so that the pages load faster and keeps the visitor’s interest (same goes for the number of pages). Is this logic still true or are visitors looking for “wow” when they visit a website?

Thanks and look forward to your response.

Chris

My answer:

I’m going to answer you in point form – check it out:

#1. Yes. The best designers and programmers I know have neither.

#2. Once you understand the basics, your decisions as to what your web-specialization should be will be much easier to make. That decision will be largely made based on what you like to do. For example, some people may choose to get into Flash based work while others may choose to get more into PHP.

#3. Cost varies considerably based on the experience and talent of the designer and on where you happen to live.

#4. Speed of the site is always important. But, since we are in the age of Youtube, you have a lot more latitude than what we had in the 1990’s.

That all said, the best place to start your career as a web designer, is to start by learning the basics of HTML and CSS.

I hope that answers your questions,

Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com

Hi,

Once and a while I use an email question as the basis of a blog post. This time, someone wanted to know about Dreamweaver and PHP:

Hi Stefan,

I am looking to get some videos on using Dreamweaver cs4 creating dynamic sites with PHP and MYSQL, do you have any videos on this using the drag and drop features etc with some code writing also?

Many thanks

Andy

My answer:

Hi Andrew,

The short answer:

Dreamweaver’s drag and drop features are very brittle. I was a beta
tester for DW CS4 and the programmers themselves told me that they would
be looking to trash it for the next version of Dreamweaver – they knew
it was a mess.

… It can be used for simple things (and prototyping), but the code is so messy and
convoluted, that any changes that you will probably have to make to
your project could be a nightmare. You are much better off learning PHP
and using Dreamweaver as a PHP code editor … and it’s pretty good at that.

In my basic course on PHP, I use Dreamweaver as the code editor and I
touch on in as far as how Dreamweaver can be used to write PHP code. You
can see a bunch of sample videos here: http://www.killerphp.com/videos/

Let me know if this helps,

Stefan

Hi everyone,

I am happy to announce our new Flash CS4 video tutorials are finally ready! It only took me a year to get Santo (the author of the video tutorial course) to finally do it – better late than never I suppose.

… I have to tell you, wrangling up good video authors is like herding cats!

Check out this sample video on using the Flash Bones tool:

You can find more sample videos on the Flash CS4 video tutorial home page and in this coming months Web Designer Magazine.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com

Hi,

Today, the Web is a much more sophisticated place (dynamic shopping carts, blogs, DOM scripting, Ajax etc) … a Web that requires much more sophisticated web designers. To be a competitive and modern web designer these days, you have to learn more than just HTML and CSS .

The ‘foundation’ languages of web design today are:

1. HTML
2. CSS
3. Javascript
4. PHP

You don’t have to become a full-fledged nerd coder but you should at least understand the basic concepts and be able to read and write basic scripts. This way, when a client or your boss comes to you with some shopping cart script that he wants you to install … you wont be freaking out because you don’t understand a thing.

So in keeping with my goal of training you guys and girls up, I just wanted to announce my latest video tutorial; a course on Javascript: Beginners Javascript.

… OK, not the most exciting title, but the video tutorials are perfect for people new to programming. Some details:

Beginners Javascript is designed to teach total beginners Javascript programming. By the end of the 5 hrs of video training (over 39 individual videos) you will feel comfortable reading and writing usable Javascript code for everyday web tasks like spawning windows, validating forms and creating simple page effects.

The table of contents:

Introduction (10:09)
First Javascript (10:21)
What is a programming language (6:18)
Javascript event handlers part 1 (8:58)
Javascript event handlers part 2 (6:40)
Javascript event handlers part 3 (4:50)
Javascript errors part 1 (6:39)
Javascript errors part 2 (4:39)
Javascript variables part 1 (10:53)
Javascript variables part 2 (10:01)
Javascript execution (4:21)
Javascript functions part 1 (8:46)
Javascript functions part 2 (6:22)
Javascript functions part 3 (6:32)
Javascript functions part 4 (9:27)
if statements part 1 (7:33)
if statements part 2 (6:52)
if statements part 3 (8:55)
Javascript loops part 1 (8:25)
Javascript loops part 2 (5:58)
Javascript object; a birds eye view (8:31)
Javascript arrays part 1 (3:36)
Javascript arrays part 2 (7:44)
Javascript arrays part 3 (5:28)
Javascript functions cont. part 3 (8:13)
Javascript functions cont. part 4 (10:16)
Javascript functions cont. part 4-b (9:57)
Javascript functions cont. part 5 (9:18)
Introduction to the DOM part 1 (8:31)
Introduction to the DOM part 2 (3:37)
Javascript forms part 1 (14:50)
Javascript forms part 2 (15:10)
Javascript forms part 3 (6:58)
Javascript forms part 4 (8:51)
Creating a toggle menu part 1 (6:59)
Creating a toggle menu part 2 (10:39)
Linking to external Javascript files (5:46)
Spawning windows with Javascript (9:24)
Javascript frameworks, conclusion to course (4:24)

That’s it for now.

Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com

The DOM is short for: Document Object Model. This is basically a virtual map of the currently loaded web page. You can use this map along with the help of Javascript, to travel about your web page and do things like:

• Insert tags
• Remove tags
• Insert text

… And a whole lot more.

The DOM is the key to all those cool Javascript and Ajax affects that we now see all over the Web. Check out my new video that introduces you to the DOM and I also teach you an exercise I came up with to help you better understand the DOM:

You can find the entire Javascript beginners course at killerjavascript.com.

Thanks for watching.

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

In this video I introduce you to two things:

1. Basic object oriented concepts.
2. The Javascript object hierarchy.

The goal of this video is to give you a birds eye view of Javascript, to hopefully make it easier to understand how to use this language in later videos.

This video is from my very soon to be released Javascript basics video tutorial course.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com

Hi,

I just released and brand new course on the Javascript framework called jQuery. JQuery is a very popular Javascript library that many web designers will find themselves working with.

You can find about 40 minutes of free videos from the course here:

www.killerjavascript.com/beginners-jquery/

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com

As you may know, I am a big Wordpress fan and I use it on a few of my ‘killer’ sites. Anyway, I just discovered that the Wordpress nerds have used the Google Gears project to speed up the Wordpress admin user interface.

What is Gears?

Gears is basically a browser add-on that allows Javascript code to run much faster. To use Gears, you as a programmer, has to build it into your Javascript code (as the Wordpress people did ..) and for people to benefit from Gears, it has to be installed into their browsers.

.. You can learn more about this in this video I just created:

You can install Gears (into your web browser) here:

http://tools.google.com/gears/

Please note that Gears works with Firefox and Explorer only.

I hope you guys find this useful.

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

Once in a while, I use email questions sent to me as the subject of an article, this time the question is about whether someone should use a Mac or a PC if they want to get into web design.

… I’m thinking of becoming a web designer and I was wondering if I would be better off with a Mac or a PC? Is there any advantage to using one over the other when building websites?

Thanks,

Jason

Short answer: there is no real advantage on either PC (Windows) or Mac when it comes to web design. Here are the two reasons why:

• The technology’s behind websites (HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP etc…) are universal.
• All the major software used in web design production can be found on both Mac and PC. The one exception maybe Web Expression from Microsoft.

Outside of web design, some would argue for Mac and others for PC. I use both, but I can see how some might prefer one or the other. That said, prior to the soon to be released Windows 7, Mac has had Windows beat hand-downs … all things considered.

With Windows 7 coming out though, I’ve heard from many reliable nerd sources, that Microsoft has really improved things a lot.

… I will almost certainly be upgrading my XP box when Windows 7 comes out.

Conclusion:

If you are looking to jump into web design, you are pretty much free with regards to which type of computer to get. I would be making my computer choice based on other things, for example:

• Stability of the operating system.
• Ease of use.
• Cost
• What looks nicer to you!

I hope that helps,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

I just updated to Firefox 3.5.2 in hopes that it might fix some issues I have been having with it on Mac. I can’t say if it has fixed anything yet, but I did discover something new: Firefox now supports the free Open Video Format.

What? Don’t we have Flash already?

Yes, we have Flash, Windows Media, Quicktime and others to embed video into our web pages, but in all those cases, we need to use an outside plugin. With this new video format, you just use plain old HTML!

Some details from Wiki:

As originally recommended by HTML 5, these browsers support Theora when embedded by the video element:

* Mozilla Firefox 3.5
* Google Chrome as of version 3.0.182.2 [1]
* Opera video build

-

Theora is the name of this free video compression format/codec and it produces video quality that is about the same as h.264 – the video format Adobe has decided to use to replace their own FLV format. So it should be pretty good.

To encode your videos into Theora, you will need to find a video encoder that does this. There are already several out there and I am sure more will come out over time … since already several browsers can play Theora videos. For now, you may want to try a video encoder that you can install right into Firefox!

Learn more about Theora.

Final comment

This is cool except for the fact that until Internet Explorer allows us to embed Theora … it’s a no go. Internet Explorer still has the vast majority of browser market, so we as web designers have to build within its’ limitations.

Thanks for reading,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com