Hi all. In my quest to become a website creator I have a big obstacle.. when it comes to design, eg making things look good i might as well be blind. Im useless!

I can code to a decent standard in HTML PHP CSS MYSQL and JS but i am useless at making a nice design. So wha im after is advice on how to learn this, what i fear is a response of "you can *learn* how to design, you either can or you cant.". Its really important that im able to design a nice looking website because not many people have a concise set of drawings from which to code the website.

Any advice and link will be greatly appreciated here, ive tried looking through google but most sites just try to teach me how to write HTML which i already know.

Thanks in advance, i hope.

Do you get inspired easily? I would recommend going to graphics(-heavy) websites and taking some time to analyze and examine things, to try and figure out how to pull off similar effects easily. Although you can pull off a nice-looking website with just HTML and CSS, sometimes a simple background gradient (whether it's for the body or other elements) can really help spice things up; especially gloss-like effects. Gloss effects aren't hard to make either. Practice makes perfect.

Hmm i hadnt thought of that yet it seems the most logical and easiest first step to take here. Currently im experimenting with the GIMP making a little banner, see how that ends up. That might also be one of my weaknesses, my access to gfx programs, i only really have the GIMP so if theres any other free and good gfx programs then suggest them too if you know of them!

Meanwhile ill be surfing websites looking at their colour themes and such. Good idea!

Best way to design is just to fool around with different effects and such in either the gimp or photoshop. Then try to piece together similar looks and make the colors look the same. There also are a few books on this but i completely forget the names of them. Look at other peoples designs and then try to create your own. Those are the only ways i know of on how to learn how to make good designs. It takes lots of practice and lots of messing around. Then you will be able to just vision a design and go with it.

Lets say you start by learning the graphic designing softwares as they play a very important role in the final outlook of your webpage designs. Some examples of these softwares are Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Fireworks, Adobe Illustrator, Xara Xtreeme, Adobe Flash professional (for flash) animations. I would recommend you use Adobe Photoshop (that is what I use and I am using the CS3 Extended version) or Adobe Illustrator CS3 and Adobe Flash CS3 Professional if you wanna make them flash animations.

Consider checking out what other people have done. try to learn some of the tricks and cuns in the designs as they will be a gr8 aid to your later designs. From there, you can build your own knowledge.

are there any decent free gfx programs about? being, currently, unemployed i dont have the cash to splash on software at the moment.

At college they had photoshop and some of the built in effects are brilliant for this kind of thing but i dont have photoshop or access to it unfortunately.

Since the GIMP is more manual work than Photoshop (since Photoshop provides more convenience/automatic processes), if you can master the GIMP, you would practically be mastering Photoshop but being somewhat more experienced. The GIMP is not all that different than Photoshop. The GIMP, feature-wise, is very close to Photoshop 6, especially the development version of the GIMP. The main things that the GIMP is missing that Photoshop 6 has are adjustment layers, group layers and styles. The GIMP 2.4 will be very nice. The current development version of the GIMP has some very convenient features and better organized menus.

Ah i see, in that case i shall continue using the GIMP until the give away of the day is photoshop I did just find a nice use of the Soft Glow filter in the GIMP which i never even noticed before so i guess its all about experimenting with the software till you find something nice

I also think that it's important for you to look around at different sites and just really think about what it is that makes you like and dislike certain parts. Before I try to do any sort of designing these days I do a lot of looking around on the web to get ideas of what is out there and try to implement what I feel are the best parts of a variety of designs to my work.

A lot of the design comes from the preplanning. You can't usually just start out with nothing and hope that it amounts to something and skip all the stages in getting there.

Think about the things that you will need in your design. What are the important elements that you need to display somewhere on your page? Which ones are more important as to need a more prominante area on the site?

You'll also have to think about colour schemes. Do you have any ideas about what kind of colours you'd like? Again, look around and see how other people are working with there colours. If you have an idea for your logo or whatever... you can use some of the colours from it and try to blend everything around you site to match that basic theme.

Often what I do when it comes to colours, is with my Photoshop open, I grab the images that I want to have as the header for my site and then use the eye dropper tool to 'pull' the colours from the images, so that I can use the same colours from there around my site, which will makes things all match in together more easily. Play and experiment with the software (I see you're using GIMP, so try out and see what you can make that program do... the more you play around, the more you'll learn of the program! I know it's a bit harder to get it to do the things that you want than it would have been with Photoshop, but I've still seen many great things produced out of that program that far surpass my abilities in Photoshop, so I know it can be done.)

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