[morgan505]

Hi Guys,

I'm very very new to the whole web design thing but also very very eager to learn more about it, however I have absolutely no coding knowledge really, I've dabbled but literally to change a background colour in dreamweaver or something! Basically I have been doing some designs in Illustrator and Fireworks for a website I want to build for myself, I tried both programs and Fireworks I know had an export as CSS and HTML option if you slice it all up and export it, and it turns into a site on Dreamweaver, but then I tried using Illustrator the other day and found this to be a little simpler as I essentially designed the page as I would like it to be, and saved individual elements as PNG files. I then discovered absolute div tags whcih I found I could pace anywhere on the dreamweaver stage, and then impaort my PNG files to make the site look exaclty how I had it in Illustrator.

Am I missing someting fundamental here? Because so far I have not had to dabble in the code at all, and it seems I can carry on adding my elements to dreamweaver and produce a pretty nice looking site that isn't confined to tables, with nice graphics etc. At what point will I hit a snag here because I'm sure you need some coding knowledge, I thought the process involved preparing the graphics and then coding it all into a site, it seems a bit straighforward so far and im scared!

Could somebody give me a bit of advice as to what the stages are in web design, I have all the Adobe software which I'v just been playing around with and I really enjoy it, I want to leanr more and become better (and more useful) at it!

Thanks!!

[NeedForBleed]

The joy of dreamweaver, is that it codes stuff for you. Otherwise, you'd probably be using notepad or textedit with pure html and other languages. However, you still have the option to add fancy stuff if you're in the know.

One thing you might need to be careful of, is the image quantity/quality. Just ensure that a page doesn't take an age to load. Another tool you might be interested in, is flash catalyst which somebody else suggested to me. It's a good tool designed with non programmers in mind: Flash Catalyst

You'll also want to read up on meta tags if you aren't already familiar with those.