[jhacks]

THANK YOU!

That was incredibly be helpful. I will work my way through this stuff for sure and hopefully all works well. I'm sure I'll stumble and fall a bit... but that's part of the learning process. I'm in between a rock and a hard place. I want to focus on productivity (build a good website, quickly), but don't want to skimp on fundamentals and get lost in all either. I'll to try my best to find the balance, but knowing me I'll likely take the slower route and learn all I can... hopefully it ends up being the better choice.

Anyway, I guess it's time to dive into the front-end a bit more. In regards to photoshop, is splicing the accepted way to design html/css? Or do designers ever go straight to the code?

And I think going the jQuery route will be more effective. I'm sure you'd learn javascript by default when learning the jQuery framework anyhow.

And then there is the back-end. Which I will tackle after the above. Although, one question on that... as I only know limited PHP (and mySQL), I'm open to learning something different (Python/Django, Ruby/Rails), what are the reasons to choose one over another?

Anyway, I'll take this all one step at a time.

Thanks again!

[chetane07]

I'm not a "designer", so the way I use photoshop is potentially not the best, but it works. I usually design my website on photoshop (after manual sketches) in order to be able to try different prototypes fairly quickly. I don't use the splice tool, but rather generate pictures that I need manually. (e.g. 1x20 image is enough for a background, logo in png if need for transparency etc..). Then I jump to css and build up the design.

As far as php/mysql vs. Python/Django vs. RoR... I would suggest sticking to what's most comfortable for you to learn fundamentals. But once you know your basics, it's much easier to jump from a technology/language to another.

[jhacks]

Thanks again.

Okay, so you just use it as a tool to get the image out there, but not to then generate the code. I'm not looking to be have an artistic website, I actually like minimalist and easy to use, so I'll just code that myself, no splicing necessary.

Thanks again for the help.