Web design can be daunting if you are new to the Internet. You would like to create your site but have no idea where to start. Html? Photoshop? Fireworks? FrontPage? Dreamweaver?

This article will give you some tips and hints on how to get started with web design – and which shortcuts to take!

I can hear you groan. I said I would give you some shortcuts, and now I suggest you learn HTML! Unfortunately, there is no way around it. Even if you use the shortcuts to web design, as I will tell you, learning HTML will still be the best investment you can make. It is not that difficult and will greatly aid your understanding of web design.

Depending on your enthusiasm and level of technical skill, I would also suggest that you learn a bit about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Cascading style sheets can help you tremendously control the layout, colors, and images on your web page. You can also find good CSS tutorials on the w3schools website.
Now, this is a shortcut to web design! I suggest that you create your first website using a web template. Many commercial templates are available, and frankly, they are beautiful, but I will give you some hints on where to find free web templates. Most people would think that searching for ‘free web templates’ in Google would be the most obvious way of doing it, but I suggest that you rather search for ‘open source web templates.’

Here are some sources with open-source (basically – free-to-use) web templates. The advantage of these templates is that they are normally well designed and will also teach you good web design principles (as opposed to most of the commercial templates, which, while they are undeniably beautiful to look at, are normally not built, making use of good web design principles). This site has over 1600 free designs to choose from. Download any design and build your site! Most of these designs also use CSS, so learning CSS is a good idea. If you are starting, I suggest you stick with the designs made with tables. These are the easiest to manipulate and use. The templates on Daydreamgraphics are not for everyone – they are mostly geared toward a young, funky look, so if you are looking for a design you can use for your business or company, you might do better than select a design from OSWD. Still, if you are looking at setting up a personal website, a hobby site, or a site related to music or entertainment, these designs will work very well.

You can easily search for web design experts online to consult about PSD to Joomla conversion. An expert pool of web designers can help you get the most attractive yet browser-friendly website in 3 days. Normally, they initially offer guidelines regarding the latest and most convenient web standards you should consider when making a website. From this, you should be able to make and design an attractive web design in PSD format. This is essentially their take-off point in helping you create a very effective website. You need to allocate certain fees for the professional services that they offer.

If you do not have your PSD ready, most professional designers tailor your design needs and offer your web templates from their design archives. This will benefit you as you are assured that the template will be W3C compliant. Consumers can easily track your site down, even using different browsers. You can present your unique design to web designers in PSD format and let them do their best to convert it to Joomla. Remember that they should also ensure your site is W3C compliant. Select either WordPress or Joomla from the menu on the left.

Install WordPress or Joomla in the root folder. To access your site’s admin side, you must select an administrator username and password.

Log into the admin backend (normally /wp-admin for WordPress and /administrator for Joomla). Many free WordPress tutorials are available—do a Google search for ‘free WordPress tutorials’. To get started in Joomla, search for ‘how to use Joomla.’