How did you start out?

Vanessa said this earlier in the Intro forum...I was just wondering out of all our amazing designers and developers who did and didn't start out with a wysiwyg?!

I can honestly say that from the age of 12 I bought a book called "HTML in easy steps" and handcoded my first website...a half decent effort at a Manchester United fansite!

During work experience at the age of 14 I was introduced to the CSSZenGarden by my employer and told to try it myself...and I haven't looked back since...

Yup i used tables in my first site...but I did handcode them

Mike

HAHAHA!!! My first site was happily created in Notepad!

Sure ... I used tables too but in my defense, back then, browser support for CSS sucked a$$ and balls!

I started when I was 19, a late starter really but now im 20 and having been coding fo just under a year and I have alway hand-coded although I do have a copy of frontpage and dreamweaver but when ever I use them it seems a waste of time due to all the extra code that you don't need.

Over the past year I have self taught learning first html 4.01 and then gone onto XHTML 1.0 along with CSS, at the moment I am learning how to make my CSS style sheets even more powerful and using them to design my layout rather than tables which for me will be a big step in my design/development career.

I plan to learn ASP.Net/VB.Net along with MySQL once I have got tabless layouts sorted, I have also looked into learning PHP and Content Management Systems which I think would be nice to know/have the knowledge of.

Wayne

I started out with Dreamweaver design view.. but it sucked! Then I joined WebForumz, and everyone was talking about how great CSS was. I decided to take a look at it.

I spent a few weeks on and off learning CSS, and in the end I thought I would never understand it.

However, while browsing through someone elses CSS file, it just clicked in my head.. and I was able to start hand coding layouts.

I started with a copy of HomeSite 4.5, and I'm still using it. I've always hand-coded.

But my coding was unbelievably bad back then. If you want a laugh, here's my first website. Just look at the creative use of tables! http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/michael.hopley/

Ooh! Well, when one has reached my age, one can harp back to programming in DOS. What's that? you say. Never mind. But DOS taught how to visualise.

Then came FrontPage and tables, which, at the time, was the de facto standard for most. And then web design courses came along, NT SysAdmin courses, military DB development, and then someone mentioned CSS. Que?

And the rest is history.

And then as a result your current apotheosis appears to be well deserved.

I started with chalk and slate....

I started designing by doing signitures a couple of years back. Then moved onto some web tutorials (looking back, they were rubbish). Then CSS zen garden. Then here. Then hopefully i'll take over Norfolk.

Ha!

It was a spectacularly arrogant name, but I stand by it

The kids may chuckle, but I am so glad I learned to write little dos programs. Oh, yes and the Dos manual and how to get your computer to work. DOS rules...ruled....well it held a short position of power...uh....Ok, Dos only sorta kinda maybe rules...oh, heck..*Sara turns, a tear rolling slowly down her check. She knows she will never convince the young 'uns the joys of DOS programing. There is no one lest to pass her skill to.....A heavy sigh escapes as she walks away.*

I guess I was wrong then in my sweeping statement that most people start out with wysiwyg! Hehe, humble apologies.

I think it partly depends on how you got into web design in the first place, whether it was a conscious choice to start learning it, or whether you fell into it. I was in the latter category - in my administrative role at work, I was suddenly told that I would be responsible for updating our department's website, I was given a little 2 hour training session on Frontpage and off I went. It wasn't till a bit further down the road, that I started to think "hmm, there must be a better way than this", so I looked into it more and discovered there was indeed a MUCH better way, and I've been much happier ever since

Your forgiven, Vanessa. Actually, my web design career started in design view of Dreamweaver...and then like many others I discovered WF and am now converting my sisters site to CSS...slowly, but surely.....

MS-DOS is actually a neat little feature, for some things! I use it for automatic backups of servers and things.

Don't rule DOS out yet! The operating system is still using it, I think. I was introduced into web design by one of my college organizations. I found a nice beginners tutorial on HTML. A few months later after searching for more tutorials on HTML, I found a web design forum called Webdeveloper.com, which I still use sometimes. Not until recently did I run across Webforumz that I really understood all the basics. I have studied my heart out with HTML and CSS. I ran across Webforumz after looking at some design templates that recommended starting your design career out by joining a web design forum that she recommended to join Webforumz. So here I am learning more everyday.


P.S. I really like all the help that comes out of asking a question!

When I was very young, I had this book called HTML 3. That was how it all started for me, I finally got my own web page going and everything. It was a site (I'm so funny) to behold. Then I used DW 4 for a bit which, I can tell you, is/was a dreadful program though at the time seemed like a good idea. I soon ditched it and relearned HTML and got stuck into the nightmare that was DHTML. This was all on and off until about 2 1/2 years ago. Then I really got going, within six moths I was coding fully compliant css based sites. And now I am here. Its been a fun ride and something tells me that there are more changes to come, at least now I'll be ready to move with the times and not be lagging behind.

Pete.

What I absolutely love about web design is there always seems something new and interesting coming along. And as you learn the different languages and how to use them everything starts falling into place. It is the proverbial light bulb going on....I have burned out about 6 of them since I joined webforumz.

Hand-coding in NP++. With tables...

Then I found Web Forumz!

i bought a book called 'website design for dummies' from the same people that made 'windows for dummies' - it teaches you totally the wrong way to build a site, - using free utilities from the internet, using tables etc, but it got me on the foot ladder.

Then i got a host, ( a pretty crappy one ) and learnt about ftp, i spent months hunting the internet for website 'stuff' to add to my own website or to make building it easyier, ( the book also included a trial verson of dreamweaver ) - dreamweaver taught me a hell of alot ( so please dont knock it, it is useful for some things ), simply because i would match the code with whatever it produced in wysiwyg.

Then i found webforumz, signed up and started to learn about css, seo and more importently cms ( thanks to craig ), my other passion is food and cooking, so i wanted to make loads of recipes in one site, but i was having to create each html page seperatly - i went to critique, learnt about joomla and found out about php ( still learning ) - wow have i rambled on a bit !!!...

just shows how much to web design there really is, thanks guys for teaching me how

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I started out hand coding with tables. As my brother-in-law was a web designer and showed me how to build websites in notepad.

I started out with Adobe Pagemill back in the day, then in college used Dreamweaver etc.. But I was in design not code blah blah and one day I ended up as a webmaster in the butt hole of Texas and history was born. Chucked Dreamweaver in the trash and fired up skEdit and never looked back.

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