The professional way to design a website?

Hi, I am a student having basic experience and knowledge with dreamweaver, php, mysql, adobe photoshop, html, etc.

I am learning web designing from someone and i am paying that person quite a lot of money but i doubt if he is teaching me properly. This person wants me to use a lot of photoshop and images, and loads and loads of tables to design my website, basically, this is the website he designed: [edit]
and he is teaching me to do the same, i wish to design very professional looking websites: [edit]

this person also suggested that the way to create navigational menus and links are to copy paste them to each and every page of your website and keep updating, so my understanding is that if you design a 50th page, you have to update 49 pages... so someone please tell me what is the most common and efficient method used by front-end webdesigners to make navigation menus so that they come from the same source in every page, so you don't have to update 50 pages... is it SSI? or do you just use some php coding?

and i really wish to know what is the proper way of designing a website, if someone could point out and give an overview... e.g. designing a stylesheet, attaching, how would the css work? or am i supposed to make loads of tables?

i just wish to know how it all works... and how powerful is css?

I am trying to learn front-end webdesigning

The way you describe here was a common way before, but now using of tables is not a wise choice in web designing. Today semantic web design is very important, which means using html tags where they really should be and you should pay attention to their meaning, for example you should use table for tabular data not for laying a web page ! Instead you should use DIVs and CSS to make a web site...
Also for navigation the way you mentioned is not good, If you use PHP you can use include method and make your navigation part a PHP file and then in your every file you can include this file and then if you want to edit your navigation then you can easily edit one file not 50 files !!!
If you want to learn web design you should learn CSS, its very powerful...

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Designing For Communicating

Website : http://www.datisdesign.com
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Yeah in addition to above, tables are pretty bad for anything par tabular data.

The new age of the web is orientated around being easier, and the seperation of content and style.

Tables can be very restricting, and far more complex to work with than just css. True css allows you to update the entire aesthetics of a site with just one file (check out zen garden, designers can't touch the html, just the css, check out the designs people have come up with).

Tables also offer alot of code bloat, which search engines dislike and in the long will cost you far more in bandwidth.

For things like navigation, i would highly reccomend using just simple php includes, it makes updating far easier in the future. otherwise you could use some sort of macro command depending on your editing software. (i don't use dreamweaver so i couldn't comment on it).

The true skill i think, is knowing when to use tables and css correctly, Tables are still perfectly valid mark up, and still have some pro's that css has yet to offer.

Thres a good article on tables vs css here (i say good because it doesn't immediatly condem tables, and gives a fair overview on both, unlike alot of reviews).

CSS is important, be tables will always have a place (for the forseeable future anyway).

Judging by his current site etc, I would find another source for learning, perhaps even teaching yourself. Learning the "wrong" way will do nothing but hinder your learning and any future career goals. If he is teaching you to build like his site is done he is teaching you incorrectly.

The basics would be XHTML Strict, CSS 2, and some Javascript or a Library such as jQuery etc. You will also need to be familiar with some content management systems or at very least the basic workings of a CMS etc and how things tie together.

Knowledge or at least understanding of languages such as PHP and databases such as MySQL are also very helpful in the web design world even for front end designers/developers.

As for learning really the best way is to ask questions, look at source code of things you like to figure out how they were done and DO NOT use a WYSIWYG editor. Basically just jump in and start hand coding from scratch, the W3C validators are your friend and will help you learn what not to do and how to correct common and uncommon errors.

As a front end developer you will have a lot of responsibilities including but not limited to comping/editing/slicing design comps, building a page/site/templates in a semantic, accessible, clean and orderly fashion, Making your web pages work with or without JavaScript, with or without flash, for text browsers, mobile devices, various platforms and browsers, printer firendly, work in screen readers etc...

Pretty much its your job to take everything including any back end stuff and make sure its output is clean, user friendly, and that it all works together. Fun eh? if you need anything we are here to help.