Self Taught and I think I'm a Bad Teacher!

Hello all, I'm new to the forum and readin through it seems to be full of great advice.

I'm an amateur when it come to web design and learnt really by trial and error, however as I run a direct marketing company I'm looking to expand my knowledge in an area I enjoy.

I can knock up a basic website (latest is www.theatreworkshops.co.uk) however I feel I lack the basics to produce a really good professional site. For instance i do all design in Frontpage or dreamweaver using design view and sometimes I'm sure I do things the long way round using trial and error, I also have to compromise a lot as I don't know how to do lots of simple things.

So I've decided I really need some basics training and have been looking for some decent courses. I've found some at learndirect, which include frontpage, dreamweaver and flash courses. All of which I guess would be useful?

The other area I have never looked at is Photoshop and I believe some deisgners use this for their entire design? I currently use Illustrator to edit and creat images for my websites, would I benefit from learning photoshop also?

I'm lookng to raie traffic to a couple of websites but I know before I even look at that i need to get the deisgn side of things slick, polished and effective and I guess i'm just a little confused where to plough my energies into.

I promise future posts will be smaller and I thank you in advance for any advice.

Yep those courses are great.
Dreamweaver is what you need not Frontpage

Fireworks or Photoshop do the job depends which you prefer.
Flash is a bonus for producing animation which is also valuable.

As for getting traffic thats another story but we will be sure to help you.

Alternatively you can learn online. www.tutorialized.com offers a database of tutorials for all the programs you wish to learn.
And if you want video tutorials try www.lynda.com

Lynda.com is awesome, I have a flash DVD from there.

Anyway I think you should have a read on the W3C site http://w3schools.com and read up on HTML and CSS as you don't seem to be looking too good in Firefox there. To be honest in my opinion you can use Dreamweaver for tables (which are not good for layouts) but not CSS, the CSS function in Dreamweaver seems crap.

The best tip is to learn to hand-code in something like Notepad, also Photoshop would be great to learn as well as Fireworks 8 so you have bitmap and vector. Flash on the otherhand in my opinion is not good for SEO and websites, so I would lay off the flash, for things like menus you can use CSS and complient valid Javascript.

One thing NOT to do.
I took a learndirect course recently entitled (rather optimistically) "Web Design".
It was complete and utter rubbish.
If you see it, steer well clear.
Not worth the paper it's written on (and, as it was online....!).

If you want to learn about design and layout, look at the pro's portfolios and be inspired.

I agree with Dan re the W3Schools site (above). Firefox or otherwise thy have some great tutorials and info. Not just on HTML or CSS either.

I agree Red, they have the biggest tutorials ever (in my opinion) from XHTML & CSS to Client-side scripting (Javascript AJAX), serverside scripting (PHP, SQL) but they also have Flash, WAP, XLST it's amazing.

Thanks all for your reply's, a really great forum.

Think I'll do things in this order

1. learn HTML in notepad
2. ask you guys to explain what you mean by CSS!
3. Dreamweaver course
4. Photoshop course

Does this sound about right?

with www.theatrworkshops.co.uk will that require completely redesigning before I can drive any traffic to it?

Many thanks

JPO

CSS stands for "Cascading Style Sheets". It describes how a webpage should be styled and formatted, e.g., default font of a page, fonts for different sections, colors & positions of different elements. CSS can be shared across multiple pages, so a website with multiple pages can have its styling defined by one CSS file.

Good place to start:
http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_intro.asp

Good demos:
http://www.csszengarden.com/

I see, thanks very much.

Started HTML on w3, it is really good

Thanks to all who have set me on my way

You can easily teach yourself Photoshop and Dreamweaver to more than a quite useable standard.
Dreamweaver comes with its own tutorial, as does Photoshop.
There are also lots of support and fan sites dotted around the web for both.
Two of my favourite PS tutorial sites are:-
http://www.greycobra.com/tutorials/photoshop/
and
http://www.photoshopcafe.com/
Both their tutorials give very simple examples which achieve very pleasing results. Try working through some of these before going anywhere else.

One tip with Photoshop; 'Less is more'.
N00bies always excagerate effects until they get used to them and start reigning themselves back.

http://www.maagraphics.com/tutorials...-tutorials.htm
Just found one with DW tutorials as well.