4 Stages to Success

There are many ideas behind how you should design a site. There is the short story, the long story, the never ending story, the interactive story and their is our story.

The four stages to web design success are a clear way to know where you are. "Okay I have planned my site, lets get down to design." When your new to something it is important to know what stage you are at, or you loose interest, give up and pay someone else to do it. Our course is designed so you never have to look to anyone else for web design work again.

So what are the stages?

• Planning
  Planning is the most important phase. It is where you bring together all your ideas, and it is where you get to explore what functionality and design you want. Remember to plan your site around the users, not what you want. More about planning in future blogs...
  
  
• Design
  
  
• Development
  
  
• Design

For each of the stages we will look at them individually in future blogs.

For now, start thinking about the site you want, and we can help you make that a reality.

What is Web 2.0

Other people insist that Web 2.0 is a reality. In brief, the characteristics of Web 2.0 include:

• The ability for visitors to make changes to Web pages: Amazon allows visitors to post product reviews. Using an online form, a visitor can add information to Amazon's pages that future visitors will be able to read.
• Using Web pages to link people to other users: Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are popular in part because they make it easy for users to find each other and keep in touch.
• Fast and efficient ways to share content: YouTube is the perfect example. A YouTube member can create a video and upload it to the site for others to watch in less than an hour.
• New ways to get information: Today, Internet surfers can subscribe to a Web page's Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds and receive notifications of that Web page's updates as long as they maintain an Internet connection.
• Expanding access to the Internet beyond the computer: Many people access the Internet through devices like cell phones or video game consoles; before long, some experts expect that consumers will access the Internet through television sets and other devices.

Web Site - Development Version

When your designing a site, its always important to get feedback during the build process as well as design. Sometimes, until you see it on the screen in HTML, you can`t see the problems.

So, I am inviting you all to check out our development version of the site. Currently it is only the homepage and contains Latin text to fill out the content areas, but basically its there. Also if you look on the right hand side you can see a our blog, so anyone can keep track of what we are up to.

Check out Web Courses Bangkok Development Version and let us know what you think

DreawmeaverMadeSimple

A nice little site offering help with Dreamweaver

DreawmeaverMadeSimple

How To Slice A Photoshop Image Into A Website - Video

How To Slice A Photoshop Image Into A Website - Video

Web Courses Bangkok - The bigginng

So how did Web Courses Bangkok all start?

"I wish I could do that", "Is it hard doing web design?", "I could never do that, wish I could though"...and the list goes on.

People can and want to do Web Design themselves. A lot of people are under the false impression that it's hard. It can be, don't get me wrong, but I can also be very simple if you have the right course,tutor and passion.

Anyone can start right now by logging onto Wordpress, Blogger, Joomla, Google Sites, Yahoo SiteBuilder and any number of others out there... but its still not YOUR site. A site that you designed from the paper up.

My name is Carl Heaton, I started WCB from the idea above; that anyone can be a web designer but with our course you can be a great web designer. I wanted people who have ideas to come to the course and grow these ideas into a working, standard complient, easy to use, effective web site that they can be proud of and even make money from.

I was working away at the TCDC (Thailand Creativity and Design Centre - http://www.tcdc.or.th/membership.php ) and thought what a perfect place to hold the course! It is full of creativity and creative people.

The meeting rooms would act as a great place to teach in small groups. The library would be a gravitational pull for people as its a nice place to learn and easy to find situated on the 6th floor of Emporium Shopping Centre.


Like all stories there is a start, here is one of the early plans for the actual WebCoursesBangkok.com site.


Once this was done, I could plan out the design. The design brings in lots of aspects like the layout, the rythem and feel of a site. It has to highlight the important areas of a the content whilst making the lesser more specific accessible....but more on that in the course.


"Content is King" we are told over and over again but the other part of that is "Design is Queen". If users come to your site and not see what they want, they will leave. So I had to get across all the benefits and features of the the site effectively.

I then began writing all my content, writing down what I thought was important for a web designer to know. I had an article posted in .net magazine (www.netmag.co.uk) and put my ideas up for scrutiny on various forums. Throw in a lot of personal experience and some magic and I came up with my Course Outline.

As a designer by heart I could not help start mocking up designs for the branding and feel of the site, so I came up with a few ideas and ask friends and work mates to give opinions.

Finally I came up with the, well, final design which we will be launching soon.