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Originally Posted by
Flareboy323 
I agree with the statement that I'll be saying that I was a complete idiot and immature at age fifteen, because we're always maturing and changing. It's like the thing they say about programmers: If you don't look back on your old code and cringe, you're obviously not improving.
I was more commenting on how you think 16-year-old girls are as mature as 12-year-old boys. Kinda sexist.
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I think I'll keep it for now, at least.
k. If you change your mind, the option is there.
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Wasn't that the flash game website you made? Dang, I just checked, it's still up haha. How do you make money off of that? I don't see ads anywhere (Wait, I'm dumb, I'm using Adblock. Are there ads?).
It wasn't a flash games website at the time. It was, I think, a game archive of files like wallpapers and screenshots and such. I switched it to flash games because it's automated. It automatically adds games to itself and updates all its pages. It was more of an experiment in automated services than anything else. It doesn't make money, though it does have AdSense. It costs me nothing to run, so I've never pushed for profits. Most my web income comes from a sub-service of the website, which was a shoutbox script that had paid upgrade features.
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This is kind of off topic, but how much money do you make as a web designer?
I'm a web developer, not a designer. I do coding, not graphics.
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How do you find work?
One word: connections.
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I had the idea of going around to local businesses in my town and offering website design, but wasn't sure it was a good idea. Of course, being a kid I would do it for extremely cheap (Like a hundred bucks) but they probably just wouldn't trust me.
Do it. They would probably trust you if you are willing to do the work pre-payment so that you can show them you actually are capable of doing it before you give them the files/put it up for them. And if they decide they don't like it, you can just change their name to Generic Company Title and put it in your portfolio.
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Also, where did you learn your web design techniques?
Self-taught. I started when I was 12, so I've just had a decade of practice. Time-wise, I've been doing it since you were 5.
Fuck I feel old.
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I've been coding raw HTML for a while and making meh-quality websites, and I can never seem to make anything good with a WYSIWYG editor like DreamWeaver.
Don't ever use WYSIWYG. Ever. Ever.
Just don't.
Hand code your HTML. Every time. There are at least a billion discussions online already about why that's the case, so I won't elaborate.
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I've heard that photoshop to make a design and then making it into a website is the way to go for that, but I would have no idea where to even start doing that.
Yeah, pretty much. A designer usually draws a website in PhotoShop and sends a developer the PSD. Then the developer turns that into a functional website by cutting out the graphics he needs and styling and setting up the DOM accordingly. A prerequisite to knowing how to cut up a PSD is knowing how to hand code a DOM. So drop the WYSIWYG and pick up EditPlus or NotePad++ and only ever use them from now on. Or even just Notepad if you're ballsy.
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Any guides/tips/good books to read on this? I don't need a "Starting HTML and XHTML" book, I need a "Creating Beautiful, Professional-Quality Websites Utilizing Photoshop and Other Editors" or something.
You could go to college for the field. I never used a book. I just Googled every question I had and tried to do everything perfectly. My questioning why one practice is better than another is what made me good at it. A lot of people program only so far as the program works. Aim for optimal. I would see two ways of doing a task, and I'd search for what the differences were and why. I mean, it worked for me. I don't know why everyone doesn't do it, but I do always hear such things as "books on the [programming language]." I've just never been interested in reading a book on any programming matter. That shit is always all over Google.
Good tutorials and read all of them. They are usually short anyway for HTML. Especially after you've read a few and can just skim the rest.
I wish I could be more professional about it, but I just never really did anything professional to become a professional. Might have been luck, but Googling is really the only thing I did.
