Posts Tagged ‘computers and the internet’

How Web Design Training Can Benefit You

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Online businesses are becoming more and more common every day. What is one thing that all of these businesses have in common? They all need websites. And a site which is well designed can really make a difference to the chances that they have to succeed. Web design training is essential to learning how to create attractive, professional and functional websites for your business or that of someone else.

This shows you how important good website design can be. Training is important because you want to be able to recreate and improve on the good sites that you have seen, or learn how to avoid making the same mistakes that the amateur sites make. Web design training will also show you some of the tricks of the trade that you need to know to make your site more functional and easier to find by people searching for it.

Good web design is important but it can be expensive. You can expect to pay anywhere from a few hundred dollars for a basic website to thousands for a complicated or involved design. And by allowing an outside company to design your website you are letting go of the control you have over the finished product. It can be easy and worthwhile to look into web design courses through online learning sites or through community colleges.

If you think that you are interested in making a career out of web development and design you should look at taking a comprehensive course. This will give you a good background in different programming languages, it will allow you to learn the basics of design and how to make something look attractive, and will give you practical experience as you design sites during the course of your instruction.

Even if you are more interested learning to design websites for yourself and relatives there are some principals that will carry through from the commercial side of the business. You will want to make sure that your site will load well no matter what the connection speed is of the people viewing it. You will also want to make sure that people can find the information they are looking for. Web design training can help you achieve all of these things and more.

Remember that computers are advancing every day and new versions of software are coming out. They are also introducing new web design programs on a regular basis so you might find that even after completing a course of study you will need to take additional courses from time to time. Keeping on top of the industry by reading magazines and trade journals is also critical if you want to stay up to date.

Web design training might be the best thing you could do to ensure you have the knowledge and skills to design sites properly. Beautiful and functional websites must be built properly and according to specific rules and requirements. Learning how to do this is not hard but it will take some time and effort to do so.

The writer of this article is a developer and trainer with Macresource Computer Training, a UK IT training company offering Web design Classes at their central London training centre.

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Dreamweaver CS4 Guides Newbies Through The Intracies Of HTML And CSS

Monday, September 28th, 2009

It is now wonder that Adobe Dreamweaver is so popular and so widely used. It offers the general user a way into the world of web development without first having to learn too much about the technologies which are used in building modern websites. Among the powerful features which Dreamweaver makes available to inexperienced users are preset CSS layouts, accessibility guidance, HTML guidance, CSS guidance and standards compliance. Let’s look at how these features are implemented and how Dreamweaver can make you look good as a web developer before you know enough to look good on your own.

When you create a new web page in Dreamweaver (File – New), you are given the option of basing the new page on one of the preset CSS layouts built into the program. Using CSS for page layout requires a fair amount of experience of the quirks of CSS and is no job for a beginner. Simply by choosing the layout which is closest to their requirements, users can go ahead and create CSS web pages which will work and which can be customized to suit their requirements.

Dreamweaver’s accessibility preferences by default cause the program to display useful alerts to remind the user to incorporate accessibility features into the elements being placed on the page. Thus, for example, each time an image is added to the page, a dialogue box will appear which contains a box for the user to enter the alternate text. Similarly when adding a form element, the form accessibility dialog prompts you to enter both and ID and the label text.

Most new users of Dreamweaver will also be fairly new to web development and may still be a little shaky on HTML and will typically build web pages visually using Dreamweaver’s Design mode. Whenever I run a Dreamweaver training course, I always make new users aware of Dreamweaver’s tag selector feature. This consists of a hierarchical display of the element which is currently selected on the page, the element which contains that element? and so on, all the way up to the BODY element which of course contains all elements on the page. Clicking on one of the tags displayed on the tag selector cleanly selects the corresponding element. Also, right-clicking displays a useful set of options such as “Remove Tag” and “Set Class”.

Dreamweaver’s context-sensitive Properties panel is another rock on which new users can always count. Unlike previous versions of Dreamweaver, version CS4 makes a clear distinction between structural attributes (which are displayed in the HTML tab of the Properties panel) and CSS attributes (which are displayed in the CSS tab). For example, if you select an element which is already controlled by a CSS rule, the Properties panel will allow you to edit the rule. If there is no rule, it will prompt you to create one.

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