Hello, after a long pause with webdesign because of studying I’m back.
My experiences is basically only doing websites in dreamweaver, HTML & CSS.
I wanna start doing freelance webdesign and start my own little company.
The clients at 95% want to be able to update their websites so therefor I need to learn Wordpress right?
I don’t know where to start reading and how I can become good at doing websites with wordpress for clients with their own needs and designs?
When you work with wordpress do you still use dreamweaver?
WordPress is really for blogging, so if they want a blog, then WP might be a good fit. If you find you need to build something other than a blog, then it’s worth considering a proper CMS before jumping blindly at WP.
I don’t know where to start reading and how I can become good at doing websites with wordpress
The WordPress site has a ton of info and some very nice intro tutorials. There are also lots of good books. Do some research.
When you work with wordpress do you still use dreamweaver?
You certainly can use DW. Make changes to the files on your computer and then upload. You can use any code editor, of course.
I guess I’m gonna do websites for small companys, they wanna have a uniqe design and maybe wanna be able to upload pics to a gallery and change some text, maybe add a employer to their team.
You can do that with WP, but it’s sad to see everyone flock towards WP just because it’s fashionable, rather than because it’s worth using.
There are lots of great CMSes out there, both free and commercial. There are so many threads around here and elsewhere on the web that I think it’s time you did some Googling. In the end, no matter what anyone says, you will have to make choices for yourself, because there’s no right answer.
[ot]“Wanna” is not English, and this is an English language forum.
I advise you not to use it, as it’s really ugly in writing.[/ot]
If you don’t have a lot of programming experience, Wordpress might be a good choice for you. Yes there are a lot of other CMS’s out there but Wordpress has a ton of add-ons and general support (which you will most likely need).
Wordpress is good for blogging but you can also make a traditional website out of it. In fact, some websites built with wordpress look nothing like a blog like this one,
or this one,
You can pretty much make them look like whatever you want to and there is lots of information available if you get stuck.
If your experience is primarily with Dreamweaver, you should take some HTML and CSS tutorials and start writing your own code with a text editor. Notepad++ is a great tool for that. The problems with just using Dreamweaver are: 1) You will find some situations where you can’t get the page to display exact how you want it. You need to be familiar with HTML and CSS in order to tweak it. 2) The code will be much cleaner if you write it yourself. Code generators often insert extra code that should be cleaned out. Also, you will find that after you learn HTML and CSS (which are VERY EASY to learn) it is quicker or about as fast as using a tool like Dreamweaver.
That being said, in regards to CMS, I like Joomla for a website CMS and Wordpress for a site that primarily wants to blog.
The biggest challenge with setting up websites for any CMS (Joomla and Wordpress included) is understanding templates and learning to create your own from scratch and modify others. You need to familiarize yourself with PHP or you will just become very frustrated with the whole experience!
If you really want to learn how to do things the right way and produce quality websites for your clients, this is what I would recommend for you, based on my own experience:
1. Learn HTML and CSS
2. Learn JavaScript
3. Learn JQuery
4. Learn PHP
5. Learn about the CMS platform(s) that you want to offer your customers
The best book I’ve come across for Wordpress is “Professional WordPress: Design and Development” by Brad Williams, David Damstra, Hal Stern. I’ve never found a good book for Joomla – just figured it out myself – that’s where you need to know the other programming languages.
Don’t rush into offering a web design business until you’re certain that you have the tools, knowledge, and expertise to offer a quality product. There are too many “iffy” or bad web design companies. If you start out and aren’t able to provide websites that your clients are paying for, you will quickly be out of business and in addition, will have earned a negative reputation. Good luck!
Only if they primarily want a blog. For a more flexible web site where they can upload content themselves you’d probably do better with a more general CMS such as Joomla or Drupal.
Wordpress is a good platform , as its one of the very popular CMS now a days.
To start learning wordpress you need to learn PHP and mysql before moving to wordpress atleast you must know basics of PHP to move to wordpress.
And also the best way is to start with twenty ten child theme start modifying it and play around with the code.
And use this to learn various functions and code of the wordpress codex.wordpress.org
