Alright, essentially I got a small job to create a Web Page for an Attorney for 100 dollars. The Attorney has already bought the domain, but wants me to make it. I honestly don't have much experience with web development at all, I have only created a few websites for School Presentations(one as a HTML document in Physical Science, the second as a Google Sites project in Contemporary American History) and done a few courses, such as Codecademy's HTML and CSS, and Build a Website Course.
I know the Attorney personally, so I don't want to build a bad website in any scenario, in fact, I would rather impress them.
Do you have any tips or ideas on improving my abilities?
Should I focus on Codecademy's courses, or maybe should I mix in some Sololearn and do some Programmr?
For now, I will continue doing Codecademy's JavaScript Course, I am already 10% done with it, then I will move onto their "Build an Interactive Website" course, so I can make a flipboard, then I will move onto their "Deploy a Website" course.

Also, tips and ideas for design would be very appreciated, because I typically fall flat on the design side of Web Development.

Hi,

I'm an experienced and freelance web designer. Rather than wonder about where to learn, you should be taking the small ideas these tutorials give you and creating your own things. I presume you are trying to make it from scratch, and if so, I recommend looking into a HTML/CSS/JS framework for the site (such as bootstrap, Toast, yaml or gummy) and looking into the scripts of those as they'll give you a boost on how to do things and by messing around with those, you also learn more things.

Web Design itself depends on what the client wants, if its a portfolio site, you could go minimalist and simple. If it's business related, you might want to research designs catered towards those to give you ideas. I hope this helps!

Remeber that stackoverflow is your friend... if you have an errors or you don't know how to do something, Google it...

You seem to be creating//deploying a whole site instead of just a page.

Akatsu made a good point which I'm going to reiterate because of it's importance. The old adage "form follows function" is especially true for Web Design. If you haven't already, sit down with them and discuss what they want out of their page (site?), what features, content, graphics/images, do they want you to present? This will help you form an idea about how to layout their content which will guide you in overall structure/design of the page. With this you can do look for similar sites//site templates, how they go about design, and what stylistic elements would benefit the page you're making.

Free templates are a good place to start, html5up.net has some good templates. This way you can see how certain features are made as well as have a skeleton to guide your own work (most all of these templates demostrate designing sites with browser compatibility in mind as well as designing for mobile//tablet). For tweaking pages, I like using the Brackets.io editor so you can view changes in real time.


As for building a whole site, I'd highly recommend using some kind of Content Management System (CMS). WordPress is pretty versatile//beginner friendly so I'll only discuss it here. With WordPress you can leverage themes to take most of the burden of design off yourself such that all you really have to do is plug in their content. Honestly, setting up a host is the hardest part of using Wordpress (hosting isn't hard). For hosting I use the free tier of Openshift, but since they are transitioning they presently aren't an option for you (but definitely worth checking on later). A lot of people like dreamhost.com, you can find promos to get $5/mo hosting if you look around.

For playing around with WordPress development on a local machine, I recommend using Varying Vagrant Vagrants.

>>5
Thank you for the mention of HTML5 UP, this seems like it would be very helpful for me on the design side, although the designs all seem a little extravagant for what a Attorney's Clients may look for.

>>6 HTML5 is standard. Use it.