Learning to design

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Charlie

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Jun 24, 2006
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Ive been doing this for a while and I can put together profitable sites, that look ok, but nothing scintilating.

What is the best design package to get and the best way to learn to produce some good looking sites.

(I accept that if I want amazing looking sites Im going to have to hire a desgner, but if I can improve in this area, it would be good)
 


You should already know the basics, learn to code in notepad, etc. Making a site aestheticlly pleasing is easier with great CSS. You may also want to optimize your code for easy debugging in the future, and for fast page loads.

Do you have a portfolio?
 
Photoshop and notepad's all it takes.
Try looking for things you like on other sites and try to do similar (but different) things.
 
Surf.
Take notes of designs you like.
Try looking thorugh some design aggregators, such as

http://www.webcreme.com/
http://www.csszengarden.com

Go to a bookstore and flip through some web-design portfolio books.
"1000 great webdesigns" or similiar titles.

No need to buy, just let yourself be inspired.:D

Depending on where you are from, you might want to go for different looks / have a different taste. US sites often look overly busy to me.

Learn CSS, code clean and nice, so no WYSIWIG, just notepad or the text editor of your choice.

::emp::
 
I like going through templatemonster and looking at their most popular templates.

And check out good-tutorials.com and look at the site layout tutorials. They'll help you adapt Photoshop skills to site designing.
 
I'm not very good at putting together sites that make you go "wow" by looking at them. The reason is that I focus on SEO and usability. A lot of the sites that the average users think are really great, that really catch their eye... sacrifice a lot of usability and are more difficult to code in a search-engine-friendly manner.
 
I've always kind of felt design is more art than science. I'm not very artistic, but I can improve usability through practice. Most of my sites don't look super flashy but I can at least make them very usable.
 
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