I've decided to make a new character, and focus on conjuration. I've never played any sort of magic before, so I need your help.

I don't know whether to focus on summoning or raising. So I'd like to hear from players on both sides, or someone who has done both to help me choose what skills to go with.

Thanks, and I hope you're all having a great day.

Summoning is generally better since you can conjure something up anywhere. With raising you have to actually find a dead body to cast it on. You could of course focus on both.

I have done both paths, I think it depends on your RP goals. Atronachs are the more powerful choice, zombies are the more fun choice (in my opinion). Atronachs are still useful without perks, so if your RP concept involves zombies, it is not the end of the world if you choose the zombie sequence. My death knight guy found that he had to use fire atronachs because he had no other ranged attack. But if possible he uses zombies for atmosphere. Once Conjuration is up around Expert level it really doesn't make much difference in power. Also bear in mind that the Ritual Stone can give you some cool zombies, e.g. zombie mammoths.

How would I go about doing both? I really, really like the idea of making zombies out of people I kill, however I would obviously have to kill one first so it seems difficult.

Interesting. To my mind I did not separate conjuration and necromancy as two different branches. RP comments above make sense to me, Now that I am thinking that way. I will say that I found the master lvl Dead Thrall spell to be a lot of fun. Having former NPCs doing my bidding was pretty cool. It takes a while to get there, though. I recommend the necromancy route for the Thralls alone, although I did both. Having two Master Conjurer thralls and a follower like Aranea makes for a pretty strong team.

No problem to do both. Just need to learn summon spells and conjure spells. True you can't have a summon and a raise at the same time till you get the right perk.

So, could I just put every skill point into conjuration and be able to have both zombies/thralls and atronachs?

I use both. Whether I necromance is based on my stock of dead bodies. If I'm fighting mages, I'll usually raise one of them. If it's a weaker melee fighter it doesn't seem worth it. Also you can send an atronach out ahead of you, potentially quite a ways out ahead of you with a perk, so they can soften up the targets before you get there.

Yeah, you can learn any Conjuration spell no matter what. The only difference is which perk path you choose. One powers up atronachs, one powers up zombies. Generally the choice should be down to your role-play concept for your character. At low to mid level, the atronach perk path will make you slightly more powerful. However, at around 75 in Conjuration it will start to even out. Overall atronachs are slightly better if all you care about is damage points. But zombies are cool to have shuffling around if it fits your concept.