Hello, I'm new here so hello everyone.

I wanted to know if anyone has suggestions on how to become a better web designer. I'm still somewhat young and have been learning HTML (been getting pretty good over time). I know 1 web designer, he is on this board (LineDetail or just Line) and he has me posting this guys articles for the clients website, so I've learned some HTML from there. But I need to find a way to advance my skills, I want to do web designing for a living so I'm taking it quite seriously. If you have any suggestions or anything please post.

Oh ya I use DreamWeaver, Flash and Photoshop as my main designing programs.

Thanks
-Chaos

Practice, practice and more practice is the key. The more you do the better you will get.

One thing that helped me in my early days was to look how other sites were built, looking at structure, use of scripts, layout styles etc. I'd find a site I found interesting and then tried to build it myself (without copying any code directly).

Learn to build pages and stylesheets without using DW's WYSIWYG editor as well as it will give you much better code, presentation and control. It is hard at first but when you're there you will produce better work all round.

Okay thanks.

Learn CSS and HTML from the ground up. WYSIWYG editors won't help you learn. You need to code by hand, even in DW. Learn to design WITHOUT tables using at least HTML 4.10 STRICT and CSS. Learn about semanitc markup and accessibility issues.

As for me, I use Flash, I think it is great. So I can advice you the site where you can find some utilities (may be they'll be useful for you): http://www.dcomsoft.com

Flash is pretty -- but it is inaccessible and for anyone using a browser or assistive technology that cannot display Flash, then you have nothing with an all-Flash site.
Flash-only sites are also basically ignored by search engines because there is nothing on the site for a search bot to spider.

I agree with LadynRed. Your best bet is to learn HTMLor even better just start out using XHTML and once you feel comfortable with it start adding CSS. Sounds like you're already at the point to add the CSS. Also try developing sites by hand instead of with DreamWeaver. You can go back to using DreamWeaver if you want after understand how to build the site in a plain old text editor.

Try devloping sites without the use of tables for your layout using css for the layout instead.

Add some JavaScript to your skill set when you're ready for it and also learn some of the basics of search engine optimization. Even if you don't want to become an seo it's a good idea to at least understand what not to do when building a site.

For the design part I think one of the best ways to improve is to look at other sites and see what you like as well as what you don't like. Try to spend some time deciding why you did or didn't like the site and also read up some on usability and accessibility issues.

blue-dreamer is right in that practice really is the key and looking at the source code of other sites is a great way to learn how it's done. I still check the source code of a site whenever I wonder how something was done.

But mostly keep at it and don't expect to understand everything overnight. The basics are fairly simple when it comes to web design and development, but every new thing you learn seems to lead you into wanting two more things.

All of the people pretty much covered what you need to do, but also look out for new trends and new technologies so you don't get left behind. Learning HTML and CSS isn't very hard just need practice.