Learning web design

Hi, I'm Mike, and I'm a graduate from a College Marketing program and I'm working with my family company that's trying to market an automotive repair website online to make a bit of money for my parents retirement and myself.

I know the topic of learning web design has been beaten to death on this website, and many of the questions I'm going to be asking have been answered. I am a busy guy, working a full time job and trying to market this product online successfully. I'm really reaching out and trying to find some good people to help me fix my website before it's too late.

I've started trying to learn HTML and from there I really don't know where to start in terms of learning how to change, maintain and enhance my parents website. The reason I want to do this is because we have hired web developers in the past and they can never seem to get it right, or even close for that matter. I want to learn this myself so I can make the changes and keep things progressing.

Can anyone offer books to read, videos to watch, programs to practice building and languages/programs/techniques I should be learning or buying?

I have almost 0 programming experience to make things even better. /sarcasm

The site is chipfixx.ca, a wordpress site, please be gentle when critiquing as I have no idea what I'm doing

Thank you,

freerider_4life
Mike

The best way to learn like this is to figure out what you want to change, then research what you need to do to make that change. Seeing as how you are using Wordpress, it's quite easy to make text changes, add new pages, etc. When you get into changing the layout, template files and the functions it can get a bit more tricky, but that's when you start investigating what you need to do. There's millions of Wordpress resources out there so there's an extremely good chance that someone has tried to do what you want to before and you'll see what they've done to get it working that way.

Catacaustic is right, the best way to learn is to fix the problems you have. Your parents didn't learn how to fix cars by walking into an auto shop and saying "can you guys recommend a book on car fixing?"

Now, wordpress is a pretty horrifying mess of code under the hood. You won't be able to do anything but cosmetic repairs to this site. Functionality might be beyond your skill level and amount of free time. If you need functionality changes, look for good modules to install that do what you want.

Basically all the changes you're likely to make to this site are CSS based. You can get a good O'Reilly book on CSS and DHTML, but it would actually be better just to fix and learn iteratively. The red title bar at the top of your page has a 1px white line on the right edge. I know why. You check it out.

The really really good tip I can give you is: All three major browsers now have "developer tools" in some way. If you use firefox, get Firebug, it's a plugin that allows you to right click on anything and choose "inspect element," which brings up an entire web development suite of tools, from CSS inspectors to a javascript console to network traffic and timing graphs for every element on your page.

Hi, I'm an amateur web designer! I've done websites in the past. Quite a few, actually. Most of them are defunct, but I have 2 current projects.

One uses GetSimple, the layout can be seen here: SolarKing
The site above has NOT been launched yet. Well, not officially. You can still access it by going to URL/index.php ... The site is set up to use index.htm as default. You can see that by clicking "Home". THAT is the old site, made by some other web developer.

Another site, a project for school. Well, I'd rather not show it right now. But it looks pretty clean. I made a custom Wordpress theme.

You said you use Wordpress. You need a little bit of PHP knowledge to work with it. If you whip up the graphics for the site, I'll make a layout for you. But only if you allow me to make a tutorial using those gfx on how to make a Wordpress theme. The tutorial is for a friend's site that hasn't been launched yet.