Quote:
Originally Posted by Torner
I have frontpage and dreamweaver. Can someone give me the lowdown on how to build a website? Is there a site that tells you how to do it, and simple to understand. I need it to be real simple to understand. I can create the pages, its the make it all work in hostrocket that I have a problem doing.
Thanks
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Hi Toner,
Well, you're about to launch into a brave new world, and you're either going to LOVE IT, or you're going to pull all of your hair out and try to choke yourself to death with it, LOL!
Seriously, though, there can be quite a lot that goes into "building a web site" -- the most essential issue is what do you want the site to do. But I'm going to assume that for now, all you are looking to do is to build a relatively simple site with static ( no content driven by data in a database, etc. ) web site.
The very first thing I'd advise you on is to understand the difference between design and markup.
Design typically starts with a map of what the content needs to be - from home page on down through the site to whatever your "most wanted response" is ( typically one starts a web site because they want some sort of response -- like sign up for a mailing list, comment on content {like a blog}, or "buy now" ). That is, typically a web site has a purpose, and one needs to structure their site to fulfill that purpose.
Now for the fun part of design . . . What will it look like?
Typically that is mocked up graphically, and certainly there will be a fair amount of graphic content to be developed ( at the very least a logo and a banner, but typically all kinds of little graphic elements right down to how you might want your bullets to appear on bulletted lists ). For this aspect of building a web site you need a graphics program ( such as Photoshop or PaintShop Pro -- or maybe even ULead's PhotoImpact { very nice at the entry-level } ) and some skills to use it. . . . or you have a friend who is adept at this.
Next, this look of the site needs to be rendered as a theme of some sort for your web site.
Let me pause on that and jump to markup at this point. Markup is the "M" in HTML -- it is the essential code of a web page. It should really be used these days for nothing more than structuring a document ( there's quite a bit to learn there, but
http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_primary.asp is as good a place as any to start ); the look of the site should be handled via Cascading Style Sheets ( CSS ) these days so that you are ultimately creating file with markup via XHTML and layout via CSS.
That's probably a lot to swallow, but here's were is gets easier: use a good editor such as DreamWeaver or Expression Web ( forget FrontPage; it's antequated, and even the last version of it wasn't that great; Microsoft has replaced FrontPage with Expression Web -- a very nice editor designed for current web standards { XHTML & CSS }, and really easy to learn how to use -- what's more, an upgrade from any version of FrontPage is only ~ $90 . . . recommend looking on Amazon.com ).
Editors such as these enable you to use a "WYSIWYG" ( What You See Is What You Get ) editor that rather aproximates what your page will really look like in a browser while you are working on it . . . but without you really having to know what the code is that is making it look like that.
One can get started that way . . . but I could not possibly impress on you enough that you would do well to start learning the code these editors are writing for you -- XHTML and CSS . . . you will find that eventually you really will need to understand this relatively simple coding so that you have control over your content . . . TRUST ME!
And this is just the entry-level basics
