Web Design Career Change

[nyquil]

Hi guys, it's nice to finally join this wonderful forum.

 

I'm a cs graduate from johns hopkins and am thinking of making a shift in career into Web

 

Designing. I have some experience back in college in regards to coding, so i think the aspect of

 

web designing wouldn't be too alien to me.

 

HTML and CSS are pretty much the most important things i need to know and master first right?

 

HTML is a given, but what are some other things that are a must know? A friend of mine mentioned

 

a few things to me such as CSS, adobe flex, .NET, Csharp, expression blend, flash/silverlight....

 

From your experience... what would be your personal approach to learning web desgining? HTML

 

first of course, then CSS? and what next?

 

Reason i'm asking this is that i know absolutely nothing about any of these products/technology

 

other than html, and i would appreciate it if anyone could point me in the right direction and

 

maybe share some of their experience.

 

 

In addition, what are some software you guys would recommend for a web designer? what's a very

 

good html editor, what are the nice tools that i need to acquire.

 

Finally, does anyone know of any good sites for learning the stuff i need for becoming a good web

 

designer? sites that have tutorials and guides on html, css, or anything that might be helpful

 

for a guy who is just getting his feet wet?

 

thanks in advance.

[falkencreative]

Learn how to use HTML and CSS first. I'd suggest learning how to handcode using a basic text editor first, and then later using a what-you-see-is-what-you-get tool like Dreamweaver. It really helps to have a strong understanding of what the code does, rather than letting a program do everything for you.

 

You don't really need anything complicated/expensive to get started... there's a sticky post in one of the forums that provides a list of various editors. On Windows, my favorite text editor is Notepad++ (free), on the Mac I like TextMate or Coda (both under $100). Although you won't need this to do the coding part of web design, having Photoshop or a similar graphics editing program is really useful for creating graphics for your designs. Dreamweaver is nice, but not absolutely necessary. Just don't feel like you need to go out and spend $500 just to get you started.

 

Once you have the basics of HTML and CSS down, take a look at Javascript/a Javascript framework like jQuery, and then later either ASP.NET or PHP (PHP is a bit easier to get started with). Flash knowledge can be useful, but most sites aren't built in Flash, so I wouldn't place that high on the list of priorities.

 

For learning... Take a look at the various tutorials on killersites.com -- the Web Design 1 course helped get me started hand coding. www.w3schools.com and http://www.tizag.com are useful for beginners. I also like http://www.css-tricks.com and http://net.tutsplus.com.

[daddyalfie]

Amen, amen, amen!

 

[falkencreative]

Forgot to mention...

 

Here's the list of alternative HTML editors: http://www.killersites.com/forums/topic/36/alternative-editors-for-web-development-dec-2008/

 

Also, once/if you get into PHP programming, take a look at http://www.killerphp.com and http://www.phpvideotutorials.com (perhaps bookmark for later use?)