I'm new to website designing. The reason I want to get into it is, because my aunt is planning on starting a small specialty clothing line (Shirts only atm) that she designed herself. She is going to start off with ebay, but she is planning on extending to the web eventually. By that time I'm hoping to know the enough to at least make a half way decent site (I tried the builders before never really liked them). Could I anyone point me in the direction of how to actually start and how vital is Photoshop in web design? I personally don't have much experience with that either.

I use photoshop for almost every image I have, its almost a part of web design for me. Also I used www.tizag.com for when I was learning, it helped alot.

Shimmy

There are many good online resources to use, w3schoolis a great place to learn a good background, for design ideas there is smashingmagazine which has lots of really cool designs and ideas. With photoshop you can build on your knowledge as you use it more and more. Did you already have an idea in mind?


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Not sure that you need to major heavily on learning website design to achieve what you have stated above

All you need is a good free html editor and there are a few on line eg NVU, and some free videos giving you a step by step guide on how to build the website.

With regards to creating images, just use Gimp shop. It's free and really good

Yeah some sort of photo manipulator and image creator is necessary, but it doesn't really have to be photoshop. As Niche stated, Gimp is great.

I would first focus on learning about html/css and how it works. Learning a little about php and java will greatly serve you as well.

While surfing around, it is a good idea to start paying attention to how other sites work. If you see something you like, look at the code and see how they did it. Firebug is a great plugin for firefox that lets you instepect web pages quickly and easily.

And don't forget SEO (Search Engine Optimization). If you are going to open a commerce site, you want to get the traffic.

If you are planning on using an online store for your aunt, you either need to know php and mysql or you need to use an online shopping cart app.

http://www.x-cart.com/ (online shopping cart app, 229 dollars)
https://checkout.google.com/sell/?gs...id=Eq60gi_EvPg (it comes with a fee of 2% but its google so you know it will work)
https://www.paypal.com/shoppingcart (actauly preatty simple since most people will use paypal, I recomend this)