Newbie with templates needs an experts advice? Is that you?

[txhepoker]

Hello,

I am a newbie that has only created sites with godaddy's wysiwyg. I now own cs5 master edition (no clue on how to use it) and have a password to template p2p.

My question is need to create a property management site.

WHERE TO BEGIN?

1. In todays design world. Are pages created in psd and then made into html? I don't know the flow or process of how things are built?

2. What is the best seo style of site? wordpress, html, css.

3. Is a page with a flash header and html/css body seo friendly???

anything to point me in the right direction is greatly appreciated...

[kdubbie]

here's my opinion on your questions.

1. Websites these days are created in countless ways...CMS sites are as popular as ever...With CMS you don't need to know really anything about HTML/CSS/JavaScript/PHP to create a website (although you will definitely be hindered if you don't).. All you need to do is set it up on your host provider and install a theme you like...

Although, to answer your question about using photoshop...yes, most people, when designing sites from scratch, use Photoshop, Fireworks (or other programs, I know a lot of people that like laying out websites in InDesign)...Then before creating the actual website, they will send a mock-up of the homepage and one internal page to the client to get the ok...(sometimes clients want to see a wire frame before the actual mock up)

I personally like mocking up my webpages in photoshop because you can literally create all the images you need for your web page in the one photoshop document...not only that but you can easily crop specific sections of the page and save them individually incase you have to make updates to the images later...From photoshop, I usually just look at the finished image and start laying out the code in my head, open up dreamweaver and start coding the HTML/CSS....(process goes by much faster when start using code snippets for repetitive layouts)

2. There is no best style of site for SEO, you can have great SEO with a hand-coded HTML/CSS/JS site or a CMS site (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.)...It just depends on how much time you want to spend on it...

Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools (also Google Analytics, if you have gmail, then that username and password will be good across all google products and tools) learn about SEO keywords on a page, learn about Meta keywords and descriptions, learn how to create a sitemap and submit it to search engines...Learn about Incoming Links....There is more to learn, just do a google search for best SEO practices, you'll get plenty of leads....

3. Technically yes, Flash can mess with SEO if the entire header area is ALL flash (meaning your logo, headline and intro copy are embedded in the flash file)...That being said, there are ways you can work around it....Personally I don't like using flash for headers...Just because there are so many options now with Javascript libraries (Go ahead and google Jquery image slider, Jquery Carousels, Jquery effects and you'll find countless alternatives to flash headers) (Jquery is just one of MANY javascript libraries btw)

Using JS Library plugins is better for SEO because it allows you to have the all the important keywords as HTML text, on the page...where as with flash, all the important keywords you want on your page will be embedded in the flash file, so search engines can't pick them up...

hope that helps...