Web design

[Az_]

I am a computer geek (Hardware, OS, and network specialist) who has no web programming skills. This needs to end. Someone point me in the right direction to get started learning to code and which other languages I will need to pick up along the way (I have a smattering of coding languages in my background by they are so old school its ridiculous).

[Scary Guy]

All you need to know is Dreamweaver and the rest will follow.

As far as coding basic HTML is a must and CSS you basically already know, although the syntax is slightly different. PHP and MySQL are pretty important as well as XML (although XML is pretty easy).

If you want to do e-commerce or anything more advanced.

If you can code that's a plus since different languages are just the same thing usually with different syntax and maybe a few different capabilities.

As far as documentation there is tons of it online for free. www.w3.org is a great place to start.

Finally, stay the hell away from flash based anything. It's a proprietary format and should burn along with PDF.

[DJ Saint]

http://www.lynda.com/ is pretty helpful with online video tutorials and such.

[Msterbeau]

All you need to know is Dreamweaver and the rest will follow.

As far as coding basic HTML is a must and CSS you basically already know, although the syntax is slightly different. PHP and MySQL are pretty important as well as XML (although XML is pretty easy).

If you want to do e-commerce or anything more advanced.

If you can code that's a plus since different languages are just the same thing usually with different syntax and maybe a few different capabilities.

As far as documentation there is tons of it online for free. www.w3.org is a great place to start.

Finally, stay the hell away from flash based anything. It's a proprietary format and should burn along with PDF.

Pretty much everyone has a version of the PDF reader. What's your idea for a universal multipage document format that's not at least somewhat proprietary??

[Scary Guy]

Pretty much everyone has a version of the PDF reader. What's your idea for a universal multipage document format that's not at least somewhat proprietary??

openoffice.org

ODF is somewhat, but no where near as proprietary as PDF.

[Msterbeau]

openoffice.org

ODF is somewhat, but no where near as proprietary as PDF.

Perhaps.. But at this point it's pretty much ubiquitous.

[Scary Guy]

Perhaps.. But at this point it's pretty much ubiquitous.

Therein lies the problem.

[Az_]

All you need to know is Dreamweaver and the rest will follow.

As far as coding basic HTML is a must and CSS you basically already know, although the syntax is slightly different. PHP and MySQL are pretty important as well as XML (although XML is pretty easy).

If you want to do e-commerce or anything more advanced.

If you can code that's a plus since different languages are just the same thing usually with different syntax and maybe a few different capabilities.

As far as documentation there is tons of it online for free. www.w3.org is a great place to start.

Finally, stay the hell away from flash based anything. It's a proprietary format and should burn along with PDF.

Any particular version of Dreamweaver? They seem to be pushing the CS4 heavy right now but acquiring it seems to be costly any way you look at it. Or is CS4 simply the way to go?

[DJ Saint]

Any particular version of Dreamweaver? They seem to be pushing the CS4 heavy right now but acquiring it seems to be costly any way you look at it. Or is CS4 simply the way to go?

cs4 is kind of the industry standard right now and is set up to work in conjunction with the other suite of products in the CS line (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc...).

[Scary Guy]

Any particular version of Dreamweaver? They seem to be pushing the CS4 heavy right now but acquiring it seems to be costly any way you look at it. Or is CS4 simply the way to go?

cs4 is kind of the industry standard right now and is set up to work in conjunction with the other suite of products in the CS line (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc...).

If you can get it with an educational or government discount go for it. If not I say go with a cheaper older version like CS3 or hell anything is better than nothing (the MX series was great). However there are a few free alternatives online as well.

If you're going to use it for hard core commercial applications to make money with buy it outright. If it's just for personal use though I don't see any problem with a little piracy since they clearly do not price it for the consumer market.

Saint is right though in that it is geared to work with other things, including flash. Even though I do hate flash some really awesome things have been done in flash and other languages. www.2advanced.com has web pages so nice you will cry. Hell they aren't even web pages, they are works of art.

[Troy Spiral (13)]

http://www.webmonkey.com/tutorial

Is where i started 13+ billion years ago just after Time Zero but before nucleosynthesis began.