Need Design Advice Fow new design...

Hi,
Hows it going everyone "newbie" to the forum ... im a pretty baisic deigner ... im looking to enhance and advance my deisgning skills(mostly my graphic designing skills, which isnt all that hot).Im currently a webmaster of a tribute site to the rock band Nirvana URL pretty sure most of u have heared of them ... well anywho there are so many nirvana sites out there ... with so many great looking designing its hard for a fellow to keep up.So below ive listed 2 links to nirvana sites with pretty sweet designs ... which im trying to match are top .... After you've looked at the following sites below can ya tell me what stuff to get like desinging tool, graphic desining tools etc ... im not a very advanced designer so bare with me.Id appreciate any help i can get.

2 nirvana sites with the sweet designs im trying to match or top:

URL
URL

Hi NFP, hope you don't mind that my response is also my first post.

The images on those pages can be created easily using an imaging program. Which program you need depends on how serious you are about graphic design and if your design will be primarily for web use. At work I generally use Adobe Photoshop and MM Fireworks. At home I use PSP (not the freebie download, the actual licensed program) because 1) it can render what I want, although it may take a few more steps to get there and 2) much lower cost.

Since you're new to designing, I would recommend the simpler, cheaper program until you know that it's something you want to invest more time and $ into.

Just my .02, HTH.

The two sites that you posted are not that complicated. It can easily be built by JSP or ASP (well, I only name the two that I use), together with some graphic tools like Photoshop.

If you really want to impress people, I suggest you to learn Flash. I know you are not an advance developer, but Flash is not that hard to learn. All you need to do is to spend some time on it.

My personal choice is to combine Flash movies and JSP/Servlets, then use Photoshop for the graphics. Of course Flash and Photoshop are not cheap, but you should be able to expense it as development cost.

Hope this helps.

Well JSP or ASP is only useful if you have dynamic or database driven content on the site. If there isnt anything like that then just use normal html files.

dude, i'm confused.

you're the developer/webmaster of nirvanafanpage.net? what's the problem? it's clearly the best one!

you seem to have all the dev tools you need!