I have been woorking on html for over a month now and although I know it well i feel like it has limitations. It seems no matter how hard I try I can't acheive what modern websites can. Mine don't look professional for some reason. For example in the top right hand corner of this website how would i be able to make something like that in html. (ITS the bar that says search, members, faq, tools, and blog. Im relly confused about this so any answers would be appreciated.

Umm.. can we have a URL so we can see what you're talking about ??

HTML IS limited - - it provides the FRAMEWORK for a web page. Most of the 'fancy' stuff is achieved with CSS, scripting, flash, graphics, and other 'add ons' that work to create a whole package.

what programs do you reccomend for graphics that i could acheive something like this in? EXAMPLE: http://www.armorgames.com (only the graphics in that, i can do the html pretty easily).

The best thing you can do is dig around the code of websites you come across. Lift the HTML along with the css and paste it into you favourite editor and basically just mess around with it.

One of the best tools you can get hold of is Firefoxs web developer toolbar https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60. You can edit the css of any website and see it how it affects the presentation layer.

Thanks I like your idea, maxxximus.

Originally Posted by np2100

what programs do you reccomend for graphics that i could acheive something like this in? EXAMPLE: http://www.armorgames.com (only the graphics in that, i can do the html pretty easily).

I'm pretty sure those graphics were made in Photoshop. It's a very expensive but very powerful image editing program.

I have a blog can I make changes through CSS?

I just found out that I have Photoshop CS2 on my computer. Would that be a good idea to use for web graphics?

Yeah. It's not to expensive an upgrade to make to CS3, but you might want DreamWeaver as well.

I agree with above. If you like the design of a site, copy it, clean it out, and fill it up again. The "inspiration" for my site came from www.simplebits.com (Dan Cederholm's site) but now mine looks completely different.