Advise on unorthodox website design!

L

lawtzdesign

New Member
Hi all

I am creating my own website (a simple 4 page affair) for my design company. I have no budget to go to a professional web designer so I have no choice but to do this myself. I use the rather unorthodox method of designing my pages in design software such as illustrator, creating an image of it to bring into photoshop and then "slicing" it and using the save for web option.

My current site can be seen at lawtzdesign.com if you need reference.

My question is, when designing the original image what size in pixels should I use? I think the last one was something like 800 wide. The problem with the method in question is that when I bring it into the likes of dreamweaver, it doesnt fit the page so I have to set a background colour, which is fine if you background all the same colour, but my design idea at the moment includes a coloured bar along the top and the rest of the page white background. Does this make sense? See Redback Cricket so see the type of style I mean.

Any help appreciated on the pixels I need to use and how I can get around having white edges at the sides of my top bar!

Cheers
 
You would use a div to hold the image, with the background colourof the div set to match the background of your image. If you want the bar to fill the entire width of the screen whatever size it may be, then you set the div to a 100% width.

Seriously, I think you need to do a lot of reading before you jump into trying to make the website. Alternatively, grab yourself a Wordpress site with a template you like and adjust it to suit you in the sort term.

Your current site has absolutely no content because it's all embedded in images, so advise you not to do the same again unless you don't want it indexing by any search engines. Websites need text if they're going to get indexed!
 
Totally agree with Meow here. You might as well live without a website rather than spending time creating something that won't even show up in Google. If no one sees it then what is it for?

Either learn or save up until you can afford to get it done properly. Although the suggestion of Wordpress in the interim is a good one.

What is even more frightening than that is that you are offering to build websites for clients!!! I hope you don't use the 'slice & dice' method for them :icon_scared:
 
Yes - that is something I intend to take off my website which I rather ambitiously put up a while ago!

Thanks for the advice guys.

Cheers
 
Hi, I am seriosuly bad at building websites, it's on my to do list of things to learn but that said I have managed to put together a reasonable site with Wordpress. Get yourself joined on eleganthemes.com, their support forum is really helpful and the Mods will happily sort your CSS out or any other technical issues.
 
Hi,

you dont have to use wordpress as this can also be very confusing to a newcomer. (alhtough worpress is huge and would do whatever you need whne you expand your site later on).

You could also get a rfee template online somewhere and mod that to suit your needs.

Find something close to your needs and mod it. The benefit will be that your html and css wil be there for you already so you wont have to keep pulling bits and pieces off web tutorials etc.

Regards

:icon_tongue_smilie:
 
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