This post will show you how we set up our computer for my girlfriend to be a web designer.
0. Computer
This isn’t free. You could build one for quite cheap if you go to trade fairs and pick up all the pieces, but we got ours from Student Computers (an UK company). Despite the name, you don’t need a matriculation card or anything, they just sell reasonably priced refurbished machines with a year’s warranty.
1. Operating System
You can do web design on Macs and Linux boxes, but the majority of people use Windows, so you’ll be writing for that mostly. You therefore need a copy of Windows to work from. Our PC came pre-installed with an OEM copy of XP Pro, so we started with that.
A web designer needs to check the work they do in all major browsers, and to have Microsoft Internet Explorer running (legally!), you need to at least own a copy of Windows, even if you don’t use it. It was just simpler and cheaper for us to use our machine’s native operating system.
2. Setup a business user account
We set up two (limited) user account on XP through control panel. One for regular use, and one for business. This helps keep your business separate from your regular use of the PC, and can be added protection. Go to all your favourite dodgy sites from your regular user, collect as much malware as you want, and it won’t hurt your business account. You only need the Admin account for installing software.
2. PC Security
I’m not into pirating software. I have nothing against anybody who does, but I wanted this to be a legitimate business and didn’t want to run the risk of corrupted downloads and blocked out updates, so I use Comodo. Comodo is a company who do mainly website security (SSL’s and stuff if you know what that is) and they produce a really good Firewall, AV, malware remover etc that is free for commercial use. Nice.
I have had absolutely no problems with malware attacks since I started using Comodo, and it uninstalls cleanly from your computer if you ever want rid of it, unlike the Norton’s trial that came with my XP, so I did a clean (no third party software) install of XP and installed Comodo.
3. Business Software
An easy choice – OpenOffice.org – free, open source, practically identical in regular functions to MS Office. Has a spreadsheet, word processor and a couple of other things we don’t use, like presentation and math formula. If your computer is a bit old, try Gnumeric (it’s for Linux but there’s a Windows version if you look) and AbiWord as they’re a lot smaller but they’re still great for letters, invoices and accounting.
4. Web Design
You need graphic software and a text editor.
Windows comes with Notepad for text editing, so you can use that to start with. When things get a bit more complicated you can install proper programming editors and development environments, but to start with, there’s nothing wrong with Notepad.
Windows also comes with Paint. Forget it. What you need is GIMP – it’s (kind of) like Photoshop in basic functions and for a beginning web designer it’s perfect. Once you have it installed, play with it a lot, run random filters through photos and see what they do, make images, do a bit of digital art. The GIMP website has loads of good beginner tutorials, and when you’ve done them, Google will find you thousands more…
You’ll want to learn stuff like drop-shadows, lighting effects, layers, photo retouching and logo design, so google for stuff like “gimp tutorials” and you’ll be overwhelmed with excellent learning opportunities. You need to get confident with GIMP so learning some of the keyboard shortcuts will make you faster and more efficient.
5. Browsers
On top of Internet Explorer, you’ll want to download Firefox, Chrome and Safari. All Free. These are the next most popular browsers. Firefox is the browser of choice for most Linux users (and a lot others, including myself), Safari is the browser of Macs and iPhones and Chrome is Google’s offering which is getting everywhere these days…
Now you have everything you need to get started learning the very basics of web design.
If you only have a Mac or a Linux box, don’t despair, you can still do all the learning on your home computer, and the majority of the work. Macs have (I think) TextEdit, and Linux has Mousepad. It’s just that Internet Explorer is the browser people are most likely to look at your site in, and sometimes different browsers show webpages in different ways, you’ll need to check it in Explorer. You could email your friends and ask them to send you screenshots, check in internet cafes, or even run IE through your Mac or Linux, but I’m not really into any of those options. For us, having XP was the best solution, as the Mac and Linux browsers are free to check, but the Windows ones aren’t. Simple as that.
That was a couple of years ago for us. The only thing I would say now, is just go with an OEM of Windows Vista or Windows 7 if you’re buying a new computer, but it doesn’t really matter…
If you know of any better software or setups, please add comments. This is the setup that works for us, and it may not work for everybody.
