I am now starting to release a bunch of free videos from our soon to be released Photoshop for the Web course. The complete video course (with source files) will be soon available on our video tutorial subscription service and soon thereafter as a download or DVD purchase.
The main goal is to teach you how to take a Photoshop CS4 based web page layout and to turn it into a website with the help of Dreamweaver CS4. Along the way, you will put to practice lessons learned from our series of articles on proper design.
Note: Even though we are using Photoshop and Dreamweaver, the lessons learned are pretty much usable with any Photo editing (The Gimp, Photopaint etc …) and web design software (Web Expression, Net Objects etc …) – these days, all these programs work in much the same way.
We just launched our brand-spanking-new forum/community for web designers and aspiring web designers. It is basically a forum with extend personal profiles and social networking capabilities like friends lists, private messaging, galleries, chat .. etc.
Beyond the obvious, we will be including a few interesting features:
Script banks for people to contribute useful PHP and Javascript.
A web template library … again, for people to contribute to and use.
A photo sharing section for people to showcase their web design work.
The idea is to create a community of web professionals that can share not only knowledge of web design, but also potentially pool talents and secure jobs. For instance, maybe you’re are great coder but lack on the design side of things, you being a member of the community, will undoubtedly get to know a few great designers – people you can get to help you on more design intensive projects.
Dreamweaver has a collection of web design templates to make the web design process much easier – all the funky cross browser CSS issues have already been solved in the provided templates.
Check out the video:
Of course, the complete set of Dreamweaver videos (and a lot more) can all be viewed by joining our video subscription service.
A common question that is put to me by aspiring web designers is:
What are the job prospect looking forward, for web designers and web programmers?
Oftentimes, they will mention web templates and other tools/technology that speed up the process of web design, seeing them as potential roadblocks for the profession:
… if these tools keep getting better and making web design easier, who’s going to need web designers?
Let me first start by saying that web designers, programmers, market specialist and all other web professionals are going to become even MORE SOUGHT AFTER, over the next many years.
Why? Simple young nerdlings, everything is jumping onto the Web. Radio stations and newspapers are going bust, magazines and books are going digital … even TV is fragmenting, where video sites like Youtube have huge audiences that rival many traditional TV networks.
But wait, there’s more!
Besides traditional media business having to go online, just about every business (large and small) NEED to have a Web presence. Today, a business without a website is like a home without electricity.
So it’s pretty clear that business needs to be on the Web and so the Web is growing like crazy. But how about them pesky templates and blogs that make putting up a website easy? Well, let me ask you, do you know how to install a blog, set up a database? Do you know how to choose a good domain name, structure a website so that it is search engine friendly? Do you know how to add sound, video, contact forms, forums …. e-commerce systems to a site? Do you know how the design a custom theme for WordPress or Drupal?
… Now, as a web professional you may know how to do some of these things, but what I can tell you with great certainty, is just about all non-web designers no nothing about how to do these things. That’s where a web professional comes in:
– installing that blog.
– customizing the theme.
– adding the forum.
Now the article doesn’t mention web designers or programmers specifically, but you can be sure they are a serious part of the mix. One thing the article does mention though, is that the more skills you have, the greater chance you will get a job and the more money you will make – something I’ve been pushing for years: web designers need to evolve into 21st century web designers and learn:
These days Firefox is a key tool for web designers and web developers because of all the great plug-ins that you can install (for free!) that add all kinds of useful functionality.
In the following video I introduce you to three of my favorites:
In our continuing pursuit to make web design easy for you, we have yet another great little tutorial on using CSS to insert background images into your web pages.
A little bit from the article:
CSS also gives us the tools to direct our background image how we want it. The default, as you can see, is that it repeats itself horizontally AND vertically to fill the entire background, regardless of size. Sometimes we might want the image appear only horizontally or vertically – and maybe not directly on the edge of the viewing area.
… Anyway, you get the idea. Just in case you missed the link, here it is again: background images with css.
We are busy at work here creating new videos and tutorials with the aim to make web design easy … so, I just wanted to mention a new CSS tip on csstutorial.net on:
It’s true: Your navigation items are really a LIST. Bread, Milk, Sugar, Coffee, Home, Contact Us, About, Cheese, Tomatoes, Sitemap. See, it’s a LIST!! And it should be coded and styled like a list. It’s easy.
Just another one of our growing collection of CSS tips.
One of the great things about web design is that you can jump into it with cheap hardware and free and next to free software. In a nutshell, web design is an affordable thing to learn and do.
Image editing on the cheap
There are cheap and free image editors that you can install on your computer. And now, there are image editors that you can simply run in a web browser!
Sure, they are not as powerful (today) as say Photoshop or The Gimp … OK, not nearly as powerful, but nonetheless, for simple image editing, they seem to do a good job.
