Website design help and questions.

g_whizz_rocky

Hi. My website design knowledge is basic. I "get" html but can't make the jump to a design that doesn't look mickey mouse.

I want to create a website to show off my photo galleries and to keep it as easy to maintain and use as possible i only want a few pages. (ie. Home page, photos, about me and contact). The photos page would contain links to the photo galleries that would be created using simple viewer.

Currently, i have an idea of how i'd like the website to look, see here http://i61.photobucket.com/albums/h80/carbonpete/websitedesingidea.jpg

Could anyone give me pointers/code on how to achieve a look like this? I've got dreamweaver and notepad at the ready!

In addition i'd also like to make a flash/gif file in the main centre space of a selection of images in a slideshow-esque format.

This website is pretty much what i'd like to aim for, http://white.hyweljenkins.com/

Thanks for any help/advice

P.S - i may be open to getting someone "in" to do this for me. How much do web designers charge or should i expect to pay for this sort of work?

M4RKM

grab photoshop, design it in that... cut it into segments in photoshop, and then save to web.. it'll save a HTML page, with all the images in place, and then open that in dreamweaver,

delete the blank images, and then recreate the tables in css with absolute positioning, and BOOM... you're done..

well that's kinda how i'd do it.. but the website example you gave is a flash site, not a HTML site, so you'd need to learn flash!
M

g_whizz_rocky

Thanks for the replies.

Photoshop is an interesting way of approaching this, i'll have a look into it. I might be up to the task.

I'm not interested in a complete flash website, but i thought it would be possible to embed a flash file with the html.

[Deleted User]

Looks a simple design - especially if you're going to use CSS to layout the design elements

Css layouts are easy to plan by drawing out square blocks onto your design. Each block will represent a DIV element.

Here's a CSS-driven layout i made a while ago that might give you some ideas.. http://www.carlink.co.uk/

Just think of boxes, within boxes

PZH

There are good tutorials for converting Layout Designs using CSS at CSS-Tricks

Scroll down to Web-casts 1, 2 & 3 for basics and also 12, 13 & 14

HTH

g_whizz_rocky

Thanks again for all your replies.

@phoodles - that CSS tricks website was/IS awesome. Exactly what i needed.

I've just realised the time and i'm off to bed, my evening's efforts can be seen here:

https://www.shuttersounds.co.uk

Any comments/suggestions will be warmly received. (pls remember it is very much a work in progress). Still not sure about how to make and embed a flash script - any ideas??

scheming_gypsy

if you get HTML then cheat like i do...

website designs are pretty much standard layouts from what you can do with the different languages used to write them and each site has its source file.

Find a site you like the general layout of, right click it and view source. Save that file to your desktop and modify it to how you want it to look. The source file, index.html or whatever, will have all the basic details in there so you can change the meta tags and display details, colours, location of links etc etc.
it can also help you to learn what commands do what so you can pick them out and paste them in other pages or locations on the page you're working on.

g_whizz_rocky

right, got the flash sorted.

Anyone savvy enough to know why the navigation bar goes t*ts up in IE?

Many thanks

[Deleted User]

Probably a box model problem... you'd need to provide screenshots for us to work it out

g_whizz_rocky

yeah, that would've helped.

Html and (more importantly) css screenshots can be found here:

http://s382.photobucket.com/albums/oo262/g_whizz_rocky/?action=view&current=html1.jpg

http://s382.photobucket.com/albums/oo262/g_whizz_rocky/?action=view&current=html2.jpg

http://s382.photobucket.com/albums/oo262/g_whizz_rocky/?action=view&current=css1.jpg

http://s382.photobucket.com/albums/oo262/g_whizz_rocky/?action=view&current=css2.jpg

cheers

[Deleted User]

err.. a screenshot of the problem - unless you want us to type out your code and try it ourselves. Show an example of Firefox vs IE

Ideally - put it online somewhere