As young designers who want to earn a little cash on the side, we often find ourselves building websites. I know many of you are in the same position, and of course many of you experience a lack of inspiration from time to time.

This is why we decided to type up a little list of websites to visit to get your website design up and running as quick as possible, the 469 way.

#1 get inspired

First off we of course need a cool design, and being the good designers we are, we sometimes need to feed off of others to find our own style. The best place to see lots and lots of webdesigns together is: Webcreme

#2 know your tools

Now when we have our idea, let’s boot Adobe Photoshop to get everything in place. For people who need to get acquainted with Photoshop, or just need to know how to make that certain bevel or shadow, check out these 2 links: Adobe tutorials & Absolute Cross

#3 find your imagery

Of course, we can’t create everything ourselves and we need imagery to put in our site. Check out Stock Exchange! The offer high-res royalty free images, and lots of them.

#4 Text, we need text!

Don’t have the text for the website available yet, but need to see how the text would flow in your layout? Use the fill text from Lipsum.com. This helps you avoid sending your client previews with weird or even nasty words in them, because you forgot to erase a certain paragraph or caption somewhere.

#5 How do I make this up… (to you?)

OK we got our basic design done, but how the hell are we going to get this working in html? Use css to get a cross platform, multi browser ready website. To learn by example check out CSS Zengarden or CSS Mania.

#6 get in touch with your inner code

Now, to get that last bit of functionality and user friendliness in your site, add some php code. Of course only where necessary, and don’t make a coding mess of it. If you’re searching for examples or want to ask some questions to the php-gurus you can visit The PHP resource index.

Now this concludes our quick webdesign link list. If you have anything to add, please drop a comment below to help your fellow designers!

469 out.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 5th, 2006 at 14:00 and is filed under Designer Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.