How to start a project knowing HTML, CSS, JavaScript. (front-end-developer)

Thanks Oziel!

I found the organization which helps animals. They have facebook page with fans and a web page. So people know about this organization. But the website is nooot good. It's just look bed. I really thinking about redesingning it.

I wondering what first step should I do if I want to redesign the exisisting page? (www.linksmosiospedutes.lt. this is a site).

Oh god! I see what you mean, yeah that needs some serious scrubbing around! Well I can't talk much right now, since I'm at work. But right away I noticed that every page has that contact form on the left side. I would think that, for a better user experience, that contact form should be redesigned to ask more friendly questions such as: "what kind of pets do you like?" "How good are you with animals?", etc. Those kinds of questions will allow the shelter to see what kind of person they are dealing with and it really brings out the details about that potential new pet owner. Plus, it makes the contact form more interactive for users, as it makes them feel like they are talking with representative rather than a machine. It would also be a neat idea to build on the "what kind of pets do you like?" question and show them a quick list of some particular pets (lets say cats) that really need the most help, along with a link to view more of the pets.

As you can see, It would be a good thing to plan out how the user will navigate through the site not just using the navigation bar, but using the contact form as well. The contact form, would probably be well suited on it's own page away from the home page, and the home page would have a "call-to-action" that would send users to this page if they are really interested in becoming a pet owner or helping out these animals. To make the call to action effective, it should probably be the first thing users see when arriving at the website, possible along with an image background of an associate nurturing these animals. As I said before, imagery will be important in this site, especially in the home page, in order to really connect with the audience and touch their hearts....

Anyways, like I said, I'm at work right now so I can't say all that I wanted to say but, during the afternoon I will come back and further investigate the site to see what other ideas could the website use.

Ah ok, looks like you're trying to figure out how you will set up your workflow to start your website redesign. If you have access to the website's old files, I suggest you make a copy of all those files and keep them in a safe place, in case you need to revert back to the old website temporarily. Then, if you want to know my approach, it would be to start all your files from scratch. Yes, there's templates out there for building websites quickly but in my opinion, it boggles my mind too much trying to look at someone else's code and trying to figure out where something goes and what the code does. So, I just build the pages from scratch; it gives you more control of the layout that way anyways. As for the design environment, yeah I would go for using a localhost (especially if you're making php files), but it might be a little too complex to set up a localhost for right now, so I just recommend using your regular browser to view your websites files as you design them. It's better to design the website locally on your computer so that no one can see the websites changes as they take place. If however, you do happen to get a good grasp on php or another server-side scripting language, then a localhost would be good for you, since you can't see php files locally on your computer.

If you do decide to start using a localhost, I recommend AMPPS, it's the easiest to use in my opinion:

http://www.ampps.com/downloads

The installation should be pretty straightforward. After that it's just knowing which folder in your computer AMPPS uses as the localhost and turning on the Apache server.

Anyways, like I said, using a localhost sounds very technical, especially if you're new to designing websites locally. If you decide to opt out of using a localhost, you can always set up a "website under construction" page temporarily and build the pages from the cPanel. That works as well. Just be aware that if this page stays on there for several weeks, people that visit the site might get confused. If you do download AMPPS, I can guide you through how it works. It took me a while to know even how to use it and I didn't even find out what it was for until I saw the video about setting up a development environment, but after I learned, it was pretty easy to use.

as the guide mentions: the following folder will be created automatically...

C:\WAMP\www\

this folder is where you should put all your website's files. In the future when you start making more sites, they should be ideally placed in their own folders like this:

C:\WAMP\www\examplewebsite

once you figure out how to turn on the Apache server on WAMP, then all you have to do is type the following in your browser:

localhost/examplewebsite/

this should open up the html file on the browser and the site acts as if it was on a real server. Make sure that if you have subfolders where you keep your css and javascript files, they stay in the same spot relative to your home page. Example:

C:\WAMP\www\examplewebsite\css\

As of that point, you can begin to edit your html files and watch them in your local server. Now once you get to the point of building something more dynamic, like say an ecommerce site, you will have to know how to use PHP. If anything that's the essence of setting up a localhost, so you can work with PHP files and test to see how your site would work as if it were in as server. I'm not sure if you do know any php. You don't have to learn it if you're not building dynamic sites, but you will need it to build a contact form (well at least that's what I use for sending messages). I would recommend that you check out the PHP development track on this site to learn how to use PHP for tasks like that. It's a very easy language (pretty similar to javascript if you ask me).

Well I actually work for an accounting firm here In the USA (in Texas to be specific). I'm the Digital Media Specialist for this firm. So basically, I'm don't work on my own, I'm under the employment of a firm. What my firm wants to start doing is reaching out to the community and helping non-profit organizations by providing accounting and tax preparation services to them as volunteer work. Inspired by this movement, I decided to pitch in by offering web design services for free to non-profits locally. We just thought about doing this so we haven't officially started yet. About finding clients, if you mean what my firm does, well then we are trying to focus our marketing plan on reaching businesses and individuals who are middle class or above. It's still a work in progress but I have redesigned their website from scratch, amped up their social network presence, and printed out marketing materials for daily use, such as brochures, business cards, etc. I'm not really an experienced guy, I've only been with the firm about a year and I've only done web design for about 2 years, so I'm only a couple of years ahead of you sort of speak. As far as finding clients to do projects on my own, I haven't really done that since I already have this job with the firm. I do have one client however, and it happens to be a nonprofit organization ( a motorcycle club that aims to promote better riding habits). Their website is a work in progress right now. Anyways, if I were to become a freelance web designer, I would promote myself by making my own business cards, building my own website portfolio, and seeking out non profit companies that I can do free services for. Once I gain credibility, then I would seek out businesses that could use a website redesign.

Anyways, like I said, I'm not very experience at web design either, but I've learned a lot through treehouse and w3schools.com.

If you mean they can be used for server-side scripting, yes they can both achieve that. I dont know how to use Ruby though, but I do know Ruby is good for web applications, databases, and server-side scripting, so if you want to start off with that, I suppose that would be good. But I can't give you any advice on Ruby given that I don't know how the language works.