Greetings all,

Recently I've been asked by my employer to develop some pretty front end splash pages for clients to use. Typically, our design department handles that side of things while I program the hardcore PHP/Perl database end, so while I know how to code, my design skills are lacking.

I'm seeing this as a good opportunity to learn something new, but I have no idea where to start, and I prefer to learn how to do things, rather than just copying someone elses work.


Where would you suggest I start learning how to make my pretty pages?

This probably isn't what you're looking for, but my best advice is to convince your employer not to use a splash page at all. The only thing they really accomplish is giving visitors to your site an opportunity to leave before ever seeing any content. Splash pages are pretty much useless.

Now as for how to improve design skills... In general I've found one of the best ways is just to look at other sites and when you see ones you like take a few minutes to think about why you like them.
There are some simple basic principles you can follow.

I wrote an article called Designing with C.R.A.P.. It's an older article so maybe not my best, but I think it covers the basic ideas well enough.

C.R.A.P. stand for contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity and if you just apply the four to a given design it's amazing how much more professional your designs can be.

I think it mostly though comes down to observing things that work and also practicing. You don't have to copy someone else's desgin, but you can learn alot from looking at them.

Totally agree with vangogh, looking at how other sites are constructed will reveal a lot. If you use Firefox download the Web Developer tool bar - it has a fantastic function that outlines tables, block level elements etc etc and can give a wonderful insight into what holds the page together!

I don't think I could live without the web developer toolbar anymore. Another good one is CSS Viewer which lets you mouse over various elements and see the css that's been applied.

Many, many more usefule extensions as well.

I love the firefox attachments, I'm using Tidy and some other validators.

I experimented with absolute positioned DIVs today, and got some alright results but when I resize the brower they start overlapping and look fairly terrible.

I want to avoid using tables for layouts cause future editing is difficult.

When I said "splash page" I really meant a home page of sorts. Its basically meant to be a nice entry point for a data system (oracle with millions of records).

I have to say I appreciate web-designers work alot more now.

Cool about the lack of a 'splash page'

One of the things with css positioning is that you often don't need to position everything. The trick can often be in knowing what you don't need to position and just let fall in the normal document flow.

Can you give an idea of what the basic layout will look like. 2 columns? 3 columns? header? footer? That kind of thing.

We might be able to help with the basic layout or at least point you in the right direction.