Online Classes for web design and art programs?

metomeya

Ya,

So I promised a club I joined that I would make their website for them. Only problem is the last website I made was in 6th grade or so..... but it was a really good one.

Now it seems like everything is using tables (which I don't know much about, we used frames back in the day) CSS styles (also don't know).

So I'm wondering......are there any good online courses that will each me how to learn them?

I would just buy a book, but i'm not the book type.

Also are there online courses for things like corel 9 or such?


Thanks

P.S. what does this site use to organize everything? tables or such?

Also I'm using Dreamweaver, is that a good one to start with? Or is there something easier?

metomeya

no answers?

RWB

http://csszengarden.com/

They even have a book, I haven't read it but I think it should be pretty good.

The hell with tables! I use DIV tags and CSS! Utilizing those two things, you can create a site with all the information you want, then have a CSS made for whatever design you want. Don't like the design? You don't have to recreate the whole site, just the CSS! If done right you can practically do any design you want.

Let me explain a bit more using csszengarden as the example......

CSS Zen Garden shows us that with this simple template....
http://csszengarden.com/zengarden-sample.html

Which looks like mere text, can be created to look like anything you set your mind too simply by changing the CSS. As such in these examples.....
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=http://students.jbu.edu/dillm/zen_01/stylesheet/elgreco.css
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=http://www.redink.co.uk/zen/zen_style_2.css
http://csszengarden.com/?cssfile=http://www.mmarques.com/zengarden/sample.css

That should give you the idea of what I mean. As you can see, each site I just linked too had the same exact information. But each looked so different!

OK, so the question I suppose you might ask youself first is..... WHY? CSS is actually very simple to fiddle around with, the only problem being that some browsers feel they want their own version of css and thus your site may look different than intended in different flavors of browsers. SO yeah there is a drawback, but it's fixable.... you can create browser dependant CSS files detected by a javascript file that will switch them out whenever run.

Next question might be... how hard is this? Depends on you really. If you wanna get into webdesign, it's something you should really learn as I consider it very basic. But if not, then I guess you should just stick to good old fashioned tables and images.



OK so I guess I didn't answer the original question. Online Classes...... for free I would suggest googling around. But I know my first forray into webdesign started with http://www.htmlgoodies.com. You could also try out a site called http://www.pixel2life.com. They have a BUNCH of tutorial links which should be helpful.

Goodluck!