Advice needed, a web page requirements

[buffal]

A web page for bussiness advertisement (a belle antique store).

But I don't know what colors, what pictures should I put up to draw customers' attention. Could you give me some advice, I am really worried if I can do it in time (till next week's Saturday) ?

By the way, I also intend to buy a book, a basic one on standard requirements for web pages but not really sure I should do it or just surf around looking for some tutorials. Searching for Tutorials is better because it cost no money but after that I find I still don't understand how to do it well, then I have to search again and again. Could you suggest me some good books to read, some that covers most of the basic things for web developers, some that will be also usable many years later on and on.

thanks a bunch

Sincerely,
Danny Gooduffalo

[PeejAvery]

There is quite an assortment of good color schemes. A couple examples would be...
1. Blues and tans.
2. Blues and greys.
3. Maroons and tans.
4. Whites and greys.
5. And the list goes on. You can search the web for website templates.

* Being antiques, tans would be smart. A light wood grain backdrop might add to the setting.

As to the learning issues, check out W3Schools (http://www.w3schools.com). I consider it the best website for web languages.

[buffal]

Thank you very much but you still don't have any suggestions of some books for me to buy. I really would like to hear it from you, not from websites. Could you just tell me books you read and find they are interesting and worth buying

[PeejAvery]

Sorry, I don't really know any books. I was just thinking, this is pretty much as good as any book and free.

[hepi]

Hi buffal,

There are so many books out there that you should specify what kind of book you want / or WHAT you want to learn:

a) Good Webdesign (choosing colors / layout / typo / usability / structure)
b) Using Webdesign-Tools without further HTML or programming knowledge (Dreamweaver, GoLive, Frontpage etc. )
c) Learn to use the most common Web languages (HTML, Javascript, CSS)
d) Learn to program dynamic / interactive web pages (DHTML, databases, server sided scripting languages)
e) Learn to use a web content management system for building websites

For each categorie there are many many books...

Best regards,
Henning

[buffal]

Thank you, I want to learn everything.
Can you pick one from each of a.b.c.d.e for me ? Something you find interesting, and teh more I read the more I want to learn..

[hepi]

Hi buffal,

Sorry, that's impossible for me. You have to be more specific. Sometimes I only realize that a book is bad after I have read it and learned from it. Then I find another book good because it starts where the first book ends. But this would not help you.

You should not try to learn everything at the same time. Start with one aspect, choose a project that you want to work on that only touches one aspect.

I would just recommend to

a) go to a library that has IT literature and spend some time there to see what you like. Or:

b) If money is not the problem: Just invest money and buy some books. You should even be able learn a lot from a book that you later find bad.

There is no book that just gives you every information that you need and omits all information you don't need.

You should judge yourself which books are good and which are bad.

Best regards,
Henning

[boumerlin]

Try these sites for coming up with a "web-safe" color scheme:

http://www.visibone.com/colorlab/
http://www.visibone.com/
http://www.ficml.org/jemimap/style/color/wheel.html
http://www.color-wheel-pro.com/color-theory-basics.html

As for reference books, minimally you'll need a good book on HTML, JavaScript and CSS. I can't think of a good basic book, but I like the books published by Wrox quite a bit. They usually have some really good code samples. There's no quick, easy way to learn all this. It takes years of practice and lot's of trial and error.

For starters, you might want to start with something like FrontPage. It will give you an IDE to work with and can do a lot of the stuff for static html pages "auto-magically" Then you can look at the code behind to figure out how it's done.

Good luck!

Linda