Web Designers Experiments
You want to learn web design but you don't know where to start. You've looked at online courses, and college courses but you're still not sure where to go. As experienced web designers, let us advice you. Now the first thing you're probably saying is "Hold on! This site isn't designed that well!" - Well that's the thing; Web design isn't just about making a site that looks all fancy and complicated, you want to make a site that serves its function.
One thing you should look into to begin with is an FTP host. FTP is File Transfer Protocol, it lets you manage file systems from anywhere, letting you use programs such as Adobe Dreamweaver, or even your web browser to access files on the fly. It's important to have files you can use wherever you are while doing web development, after all, what happens if you come across a great idea you need to implement as soon as possible, but you're in the pub and can't save it? FTP will come to your aid and let you save it to a remote server, letting you come back to access your files at another time. Extra information about hosted ftp.
The second thing you should consider, and really the first to think about when you're setting out to create a site, is just what the sites purpose is. Do you want to provide an information resource that people can find and use to help them, much like Wikipedia? Or is it going to be a store, like Amazon? Different businesses will require different designs to meet their needs. If you have a shop, you need to be able to search for specific items, but if you're providing information about (for the sake of example) bacteria, then you want to keep it simple with a menu that lets you find the information people will need.
The third thing to consider in designing a site is SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation. Especially if it's a business website. It's no good just throwing up any old website, you've got to think about things like the content, page titles and headers, and more. If you don't think about these things and you make the mistake of building a site that cannot have SEO then you may struggle in the future to really climb rankings on sites such as Google.