A CSS newbie who needs to make a website...

snow patrol · 6 Mar 2006 at 09:10

Hi all, my Dad has asked me to do quite an extensive website for him and i've decided that CSS is the best way to go. I've done a couple of basic websites in the past, but only used HTML. I have dreamweaver 8 at my disposal, as well as fireworks/photoshop etc.

I was just wondering really...is CSS easy to get in to? I've always used 'design view' in the past, and know next to nothing about coding a website properly.

Are there any good websites that anyone can personally recommend for a complete beginner in the field?

I don't want to design anything overly flashy but rather something neat and compact.

Many thanks in advance.

Flanders · 6 Mar 2006 at 09:28

Best place to go is www.w3schools.com

Good luck.

snow patrol · 6 Mar 2006 at 11:44

thanks, that link looks interesting

blade007 · 6 Mar 2006 at 13:22

I knew naff-all about html/css in December. I began with doing the W3C schools as mentioned by someone else. It's a good intro but soon gets boring. Next I looked at the members' sites on the sticky in this forum and anything interesting I looked at the source and took a little bit out, like making a box with a border and putting text in it, then floating an image over to the right and stuff.

Then I began looking at templates, I think from oswd, and how they were using CSS to contruct the layout. Had a go, and was crap, so I borrowed a couple of layouts and adjusted them (usually by trial and error, looking at the widths of one div and how it affects the output). This was much bettter than learning from scratch coz you can see the impact.

The difficult bit is interactivity and graphics. Graphics I use photoshop, but I'm not very skilled. Interactivity, like Javascript I tend to borrow from free scripts on the web and leave the authors name in the source (why re-write things?).

There, it took me about 2 months to learn all that. Good luck. It was fun for me, if you have the time give ita ago. But you'll need a lot of determination.

blade007 · 6 Mar 2006 at 13:30

advanced CSS can be found at CSS ZenGarden.

and I found that one of the member's sites, DaveRedeer designs, were excellent, although there's a lot of hacks in there, which I don't like. But his presentation is top notch.