Tips on Web Designing

[LoverRule]

Im thinking about designing a website layout. My first one (if I do one) will probably be pretty terrible, as I've never done one before :P Has anyone got any good tips for me, and is Macromedia Fireworks a good program to use? Thanks.

Edit: Btw, its a habbo layout I wanna do ;)

[Tomm]

Read some tutorials first.

[timROGERS]

Hello sister :P

[LoverRule]

Read some tutorials first.

Okidoke, are there any good ones you would recommend for me?

[Tomm]

Hello sister :P

Shes your sister lmao?

[Luckyrare]

HIA EMZ!1111

Download fireworks and www.pixel2life.com

[Craig]

Lets hope she is better than Tim >;P

Whatever you do,don't take tips from your bro:P Nah just kidding urmm you could ask your bro cos he's good at it ;) And tell him to stop being a willy.

[timROGERS]

I'm helping her with stuff already :) HIA DANNI!

[fdb]

www.w3schools.com for anything relating to coding.
As for actually designing a site itself, there are no real rules to how you make your site look and work but it's always a good idea to keep a few basic guidelines to make your site as accessible as possible, things such as avoiding those annoying javascript addons like animated cursors, falling leaves/snow etc and having too many scrolling text areas is always an instant put off for most visitors.
Also keep a good colour scheme in mind, you dont want something so bright and lairy that it burns your retinas so that you still see it when you shut your eyes. :p
Thats all pretty much common sense though, best way to work out what looks right is to surf a few fansites and see what they've done, i'm sure along the way you'll see a few that will give you a good idea of what not to do as well.:)

Programs like Fireworks or Imageready are ok for slickng and optimising images for the web but i wouldn't rely on them to generate the code for you, they tend to make a real mess of it and you'll end up with twice as much code than you really need which means longer loading times and higher bandwidth useage, it's far better to learn html yourself as it'll help you to develop better sites later on, it seems a bit confusing at first but in all honesty there's only really a dozen or so html tags you'll ever use so once you know how to use them it'll be plain sailing, the w3schools site is about the best place to learn plus it has a "try it and see" feature thats quite useful.

[nets]

How come your sister lives in a different place to you? Lol

[Luckyrare]

Its because Tim likes to say he lives in London to make him sound posh ;)

[redtom]

just make it with out taking tutorials and see what u think you need to impove on the most then take a tutorial on that, then make the layout again with what you now no and carry on doing that

[Evasion]

Well, im only a begginer and heaps of people have told me that you should always have your images aligned, don't use any diagonal lines ect. I reccomend Fireworks or Photoshop for designing layouts, but I use Fireworks.

[redtom]

fireworks is easyer to use, you can use paint if you have nothing ells