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Synonymous
May 24, 2011

That was a nice distraction.
Hi all,

I'm trying to gradually teach myself web design, as my career is in eCommerce and I want to look at the guts of my platform and better understand how it works, where I need to look for what, and what can and can't be done. Plus hey, resume and upskilling, right?

I'm working through w3school and playing with my company-assigned sandbox, but I was wondering if there were any hints, tips, or recommended tools out there that I can use to boost my learning. My platform is built with Bootstrap and AJAX, and I have really basic HTML functionality knowledge, but am working on styling as that's where my major lacking is.

Are there any other resources I should pursue, any clients that work well (and are ideally free for personal use, as this is a weekend project), or anything I should know getting into this? What order should I approach this with?

Currently I use:
Filezilla
Sublime Text Editor

and white wine.

Thanks.

Synonymous fucked around with this message at 10:31 on Mar 16, 2017

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Scudworth
Jan 1, 2005

When life gives you lemons, you clone those lemons, and make super lemons.

Dinosaur Gum
Your description of what you want to learn is front end development, not design, unless you're sticking hard to CSS and learning typography and colour theory.
Knowing this will help you.

Synonymous
May 24, 2011

That was a nice distraction.

Scudworth posted:

Your description of what you want to learn is front end development, not design, unless you're sticking hard to CSS and learning typography and colour theory.
Knowing this will help you.

Yeah true. Sorry for lack of clarity!

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.
I've heard some good things about freecodecamp.com, which seems oriented around web development (initially with a focus on the front end I believe). I tested it a little bit and it seemed fine.

Careful Drums
Oct 30, 2007

by FactsAreUseless

Synonymous posted:

any clients that work well (and are ideally free for personal use, as this is a weekend project)

One good platform for making things on the web is codepen, you can make your own things or remix existing things, all for free and runs entirely in the browser. This is great for creating something you want to show off later e.g. blog post or resume.

Another new, in-beta platform is Glitch, The idea being a new more technical iteration on Geocities type thing.
Which actually reminds me of Neocities which is quite literally an attempt at recreating Geocities.

Web front-end development is really cool. I think the best 'hub' for knowledge is the Mozilla Developer Network.

Kwan_Kung
Sep 28, 2005
I learned quite a bit from https://tympanus.net/codrops/ regarding design and such, the weekly collective news often has other tutorials and resources. I had friends help me learn OOPHP and MVC frameworks, guess it wouldn't hurt to learn a bit about those if you haven't already got experience with them.

little munchkin
Aug 15, 2010
One thing I would recommend is looking into XAMPP as a replacement to filezilla. It's a virtual web server that will let you run ajax and other stuff on your home computer instead of uploading stuff to an actual server with filezilla every time you want to make a change.

As far as text editors go, use whatever you're comfortable with. Anything with good autocomplete and syntax highlighting is fine. There's fancy stuff like dreamweaver but it's not necessary. There's professionals that use old console-based linux editors, to give you an example of how little a fancy editor matters.

IronDoge
Nov 6, 2008

If you want to get all fancy and learn the linux filesystem at the same time, you can use VirtualBox and Vagrant to run a simulated linux server on your machine. Probably a little more complicated setup then XAMPP, but I like that I can get a clean image of a web server whenever I want.

gay for gacha
Dec 22, 2006

Cicero posted:

freecodecamp.com,
Preface this with I have never done fcc and think web dev is insufferable.

I am involved in a tiny online community that exists solely to motivate people trying to learn to code and change careers later in life. Everyone starts with freecodecamp and some people (2) are progressing very rapidly through it. We have an insane turnover rate on people trying to learn to code but leaving when it gets difficult.

The two people who are getting through freecodecamp love it because it helps them build a portfolio while they develop skills. One person feels like it doesn't teach you but instead gives you a paragraph and tells you to go off on your own. In my opinion that is where it excels, you have to go find out the answers to work on these projects and as you progress your portfolio grows and when you go seeking employment you have something to show instead of just saying " Yeah I can code react dudebro, I read a book on Ecma Script too".

One of the biggest issues we see is people getting stuck in doing the projects in the beginning quarter, before the first certificate and then quitting coding altogether, or quitting FCC to go drift away aimlessly through PDF's and books for months and then coming out being able to talk about coding but not being able to write a line.
FCC if done all the way through gives you so many more hours coding then perhaps those web dev bootcamps due because it is significantly longer--but if you are are going to sit at home jerking off and watching anime, then you may be better off with something else.

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edmund745
Jun 5, 2010
I was using an ancient copy of Adobe GoLive to edit a static-page personal website, and asked in the Windows software thread in the Windows hardware/software forum what similar but current software choices there were that were not Adobe Dreamweaver because it costs too much.
(Adobe GoLive was the website creation program that Adobe used to sell, before they bought Macromedia and took over Dreamweaver)
They all bitched at me because "you're doing it wrong, all that is done online with CMS now", which is not totally incorrect, but anyway.
I wanted software on my own PC to do this kind of editing--not an online service.

The best alternative I've found is a open-source program called BlueGriffon: http://bluegriffon.org/

It is an open-source software, and there is a FREE version you can download. The free version does not have all the features enabled however.
It does HTML, CSS, website templates, HTML5 and all the other modern stuff, it shows the page code and it has an editable WYSIWYG editor.
The free version allows you to save the files, and it saves them as "normal" HTML pages and images--it doesn't save them in some odd proprietary format.
The free version is entirely usable for editing single pages, but not really ideal for trying to work with an entire website.

I paid for the tier-1 license that costs $80. It includes the help files (a PDF download) and enables the Project Manager, which is a treeNode-view of local files and some other things also.
The Project Manager is what lets you conveniently see how the website files are arranged, and you can drag and drop them around in the website and editor views.

One downside I can already see is that to use the Project Manager, you have to set up a Project in it, and to do that you must enter the remote host's login credentials. It verifies them before finishing creating the project.
After that, anyone who starts up the software can edit any of the sites in the Project Manager. There is no other protection to prevent that. I already emailed them to complain about that.
You cannot see this issue unless you pay $80 for the license.

There is no forum on the website for users. There is a Google group I've found.

One complaint people have with using it is that if you make manual changes to the code view and then make any changes to the WYSIWYG view--the program tends to refactorize the entire page, revising your own changes even if they were in a different section of the page.
That is not ideal, but not totally unexpected either.

--------

If you want something even simpler to use that just does HTML editing mainly, then look at Kompozer: http://www.kompozer.net/
It is another open-source/freeware program that works in standard file types. It doesn't even really "install", you just unzip it and click on the kompozer.exe file to run it.
It has a code editor, a WYSIWYG editor, a CSS editor, a theme feature and has a treeNode view built-in also.
If you ONLY want to make (or learn to make) plain-HTML websites, it does everything you need and is pretty simple to use.
It is free but they only ask $30 for it.

edmund745 fucked around with this message at 21:56 on May 29, 2017

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