Hi

I have been doing website design now for about 10 years and along the way I have learned tricks.

I can make a website look professional and fresh as I am not to bad on design, but I build these websites from scratch with expression web (No manual Code) adding different sections for example coffeecup form builder for forms, other software to put dates, slideshows etc none of it is me really and I kind of feel like I am cheating myself and if I ever went to sell a website cheating my customer.

I have recently started to learn Joomla and bought the book Joomla for Dummies its very interesting and I am getting the idea on how it works.

So I was wondering if you are a website designer what would I need to learn be-four I went out and looked for clients.

The weird thing is, if someone asked me for a website I can create a website all fancy with forms, graphics, Jquery slideshows and gallerys and cc3 menus. But in my head I cant actually build a real website as I don't know Content Management and all the stuff on the site is created with 3rd party software.

Thanks for any advice negative or positive.

As the term professional only relates to PAYMENT, ie if you get paid by someone to develop one site you are automatically a professional, i dont really understand the question.

If you are capable of making a website using tools, software , lets say CC VSD and someone who hasn't got the time to learn it, or want to, askes you to write them a website based on your examples , then he or she is happy to pay you regardless of how you achieved it.

I therefore suggest, you want a website of your own offering the service you want to provide with lots of examples of what you can do

After all Rolls Royce mechanics use SnapOn tools and you pay for their expertise in using them to produce a Rolls Royce car.

Here is my example just incase anyone stumbles across it : www.toptenwebsite.co.uk and i am definitely an amateur , it is at the bottom of all my websites as a link, to try to make them look less homemade

Karl, there was a discussion similar to this some time ago, but I don't remember where....
I think we all agreed that honesty is the key here.
Because I mainly use VSD, I am able to offer my clients a custom design at a very reasonable price due to VSD's speed and flexibility. They can pay more for a hand-coded site, or less at a cheesy template factory. Once I explain the benefits to them, they don't care what tools I use or don't use – they're excited to see the end results created just for them at affordable prices.

There are many web designers out there now that only use Wordpress (and not all of them are up front about it ). Use Expression Web, Joomla, Notepad... whatever. As long as you offer a quality product at a fair price you should be good to go. Just give your clients a heads-up about what they're getting (for future maintenance and up-dating).

(...and, there are plenty of perfectly miserable, ugly, clunky sites out there – all hand-coded using the latest conventions from 1998 – it's more important what you do with the tools you use!)

I think one of the things to take into consideration here is the ability of your clients to edit their sites should they choose to do so. Many may not have any ability in coding at all, and will need to be setup with the VSD program as well as the files you created in order for them to do so. The learning curve goes both ways whether it's Visual or Code based so really that part doesn't matter as long as you have the ability to be able to teach them how to do it.

Keep in mind that in most cases you really don't want them to edit the site outside of VSD as you can never put it back together for them (with their changes) should they mess it up or the server mess up or whatever may befall it so you need to alert them of that particular thing very clearly.

Other than that, I don't think it really matters at all how the sites are created. For the most part, the only thing that matters is editability. If you have the skills, then make the site with what you know and you don't have to spill any beans on how you create that site unless they ask specifically, or unless they want to do the editing afterwards themselves. You work just as hard to put a site together, research scripts for specific functions as anyone else does, so don't short change yourself.

Always keep one major thing in mind. They are coming to you because you've done sites they liked, or because they don't have the time to mess with it themselves, or they don't have the skills period and will be glad to have yours regardless of the tools used.

Have fun with it. Yes I am a coder, I use HTML Editor, but I have seen some very beautiful sites created by VSD also and truly it's not all about tools, it's about design, what can you do with the tools you have and have skills for.

Other than that, take some time even if it's a little here and there and learn some HTML and CSS as you can so you can understand how it's all worked in there and to help you embellish your VSD site with a little more complexity as you go. Never hurts to have more tools

HTML & CSS!!! Learn it, Love it, Use it!

Karl,

As I mentioned somewhere else on this forum (where exactly, I don't recall), CoffeeCup's HTML Editor provides a wonderful learning tool in the form of its included pre-cast layouts. These offer a nice head start, because it's always easier to start with something that works and make small changes than to try to create from the ground up. If the HTML and CSS for a three-column "fluid" layout seems too abstract, start instead with one of CoffeeCup's pre-cast HTML-based sites, with their included sample graphics, headlines, buttons etc. You can learn a lot by reading and hacking them.

If you've already learned how to build mash-up sites with a visual editor and widgets from Google et. al., you are quite capable of learning HTML and CSS. It's the same thing, just at a finer level of granularity. The finer granularity will give you more control, that's all. For example, you can position site elements relative to one another rather than relative to the page viewport, which makes adding, resizing and removing elements much easier -- they just "flow" where they need to go as you make changes in the HTML.

There is nothing wrong or unethical with building mash-up sites if that's acceptable to the client. I know a guy who has built a successful consulting practice out of mash-ups for political campaigns, for instance. He doesn't touch HTML or CSS, and wow, are his sites butt-ugly! (E.g. colors, fonts and grid alignments are inconsistent and visually jarring to behold.) However, he assembles them lightning-quickly and includes the social media and blogging features that his clients need. Everybody seems happy.

The practical reason for digging into HTML and CSS before pursuing clients is that someday, some client will want (and actually need) something that you can't achieve with visual site tools. However, if you spend all your time learning HTML and CSS (and JavaScript and PHP and jQuery and everything else), you won't be out selling to potential clients, and selling is what makes you money.

One way to get unstuck is to develop a circle of consultant friends who can help you with the finer technical points. You already have ten years invested in the skill set needed for selling, which is rapid prototyping and mash-ups. Go for it, I say! Spend your days selling and your evenings learning the tech details.

Joomla I am not so crazy about. Of course I have a favorite open-source, freeware content management system / code management framework. This is not the forum to discuss it, however.

Using a CMS like Joomla doesn't make you a website designer, and certainly not a website developer. Put down the toys and pick up a book. Here's a great book for beginners, http://www.sitepoint.com/books/html3/ and for goodness sake, learn a scripting language afterward. See this page for an overview of many languages, http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Web_Develo … g_language

Do yourself a favor and stay away from ASP unless you want to be tied to Windows Server, forevermore. Any language where you have to explicitly declare variables before using them is for masochists. PHP is a loosely typed language and easily learned over a weekend.

I agree specifically on pouring cold water onto Joomla! Every Joomla! site looks like all of the others. However, not every CMS has such a rigid templating system. My fav actually lets me use HTML pages as templates, so I lose nothing on site-design richness. I wouldn't build a site of more than four pages without it. All the more so if there is a lot of content to manage (try thousands of articles, for instance).

Amen on dodging the .ASP and .NET world. This advice becomes more and more apt and inclusive every day!

Hmmmm.... declaring variables has saved me a world of hurt over the years. I wish I could explicitly type PHP variables. I must be one o' them thar knuckle-draggin' masochists.

@Halfnium Ah yes but with proper error_reporting, you would see undefined variables, straight away. You see, there's always an upside. o_O

But David what about client side languages they require declaration prior to use. But I must admit I do like Php and sometimes wish other languages could be as loose.

I have a feeling Quick basic used to be similar but that was a long long time ago. I hope one day HTML or its replacement would become a true programming language then it would not need Javascript, Jquery, Php etc to overcome its inabilities. Css is just a crutch. to do what variables and some expressions would allow with ease. I doubt if it will happen in my life time though.

Halfnium Yes you are *Edited for Lang...* if you do and *Edited for Lang...* if you don't Deciding what the variable is for before use is sort of a safety but you know the feeling, you are in an expression and need to drop in a variable and try to remember which ones you created and for what, so back to the top or wherever you declared them and have to see what to use. It is a luxury to use one as one type for this and type change for that.
Then you are thankful you were forced to declare before use. I think in the long run I would go for the safety aspect. You get my vote