There’s a college in a city near by my place that you can choose which one you’ll learn between these:
- Web design
- PHP
- ASP
I have been there to attend web design class, the softwares they used were mostly photo shop, dream weaver MX. I saw that they really taught the students from the start about how to make and change a font color, background color, just a very simpler HTML codes most of you already knew (CSS, you think? Nope, not yet. They still used table tags and added the font size, color, background color, image, etc in the table tag itself). I attended this class for a while besides my real study (one day, it’s on saturday morning. This college is full with people who already have job so we could choose when we wanted to study, in the evening, or only on saturday, most of these people studied there because they’re sent by their companies to follow these courses, the companies paid 1/2 of the normal price and they paid the rest of it. Me? Individual and it really costed me a lots, just for few classes in few weeks). This was a short term course, my mind changed and I decided to attend PHP class but unfortunately I got difficulty with the time and if I attended it, my real study would be abandoned. I felt that I’ve chosen a wrong way, I felt I should have chosen PHP class in the beginning, no matter if I had to attend the evening class. When I wanted to switch I was already busy preparing for my internship, finishing the papers, interviewing a company and got interviewed before the study ended and before my internship started.
For me, I could learn about CSS, making/editing something with photo shop, HTML-codes manually as there are lots of tutorial sites on the net already. But PHP? It’s more complicated for me to learn manually even though I already have a PHP4 complete hand book. This book has 625 pages and I really have to re-read again and again. I can make layout by learning it manually, I can make vector image by learning it from the tutorial site, but to really make a PHP scripts I have to be guided/taught as this is a scripting language and guess what, I learn more from a weblog, I don’t only get inspiration, ideas, etc, but I am able to make a layout know about PHP codes (to know about PHP codes doesn’t mean I can code, at least I know how it looks like. But don’t ask me about CGI as I am really blind of it and it doesn’t interest me). All of these things come from having a weblog and site, if I didn’t have weblog, I shouldn’t know how to make layout, shouldn’t even know that PHP and CGI exist on the net.
It’s however nice to learn about web design manually, or in the tutorial books. But learning it from the tutorial site is way more cheaper than buying a book. These are the links which I find useful:
- CSS Max Design
One list, many options. This is how to make a navbar. I still visit this site if I want to make a new navbar.
- iCapture
After designing a layout and testing it in few browsers you’ve installed, if you still use windows and don’t have macintosh, you may visit this site to see how it looks like in Mac.
- Squidfingers Patterns
For the background images, this link might be useful. But I guess lots of people already knew it.
- Check your layout in another screen resolution
Want to check your layout in another screen resolution? Just visit this.
- Design tips for non-designers
the name explains it all
- CSS Access Keys
How to make a horizontal toolbar list with access keys
- Css Image Maps
Curious? Check it!
These links are hopefully useful, I will add more later.
My opinion about web designer and web developer (or just someone who has learnt about scripting lanugages, what is s/he called? Sorry, I am very tired this moment, my mind doesn’t work properly LOL). Web designer is learning about “design”, so if I learn about design, doesn’t mean I can code, but if I learn about scripting languages (PHP, ASP, CGI, etc) I still can learn about how to design a layout manually. It’s nice to do it, being otodidac. It’s better if I also can code besides design. There are many ways to learn about html-codes, css, making/editing something with photo shop, etc. Sourcing the page is not that bad, I learn something from it. Sourcing the page becomes bad when people abuse it, they copy the whole content and consider it as their own made layout, instead of learning how to put this and that in a right place, instead of learning new tags. This is perhaps one of the reasons why people don’t like if someone sources their pages, because they don’t know what s/he does due to the numbers of copycats.
