Alrighty, I'm pretty competant withe the net n all that but programming just goes over my head. I want to build myself a functional site, basically main page a blog, have bit to collect links of sites i like etc, have a bit for pics (poss to let ppl i know post some too, maybe comments) a forum possibly and any other ideas you may have... The question is, how is best to go about this.. i.e. what kinda programs are best to use and what is easy to use for a new start, i just want a quick to make good looking website which has great functionality and is easy to maintain, sounds siple huh? lol Thanks in advance folks, Stuart
If thats all you want with the minimum of pain, something like http://www.blogger.com/ with one of there default templates, mabie tweaked a bit to your own style. Being more adventerous you can buy some webspace from a hosting company (making sure they offer php and mysql) and choose from one of the free blogging programms and install it yourself: http://www.textpattern.com/ http://cafelog.com/ http://wordpress.org/ There might be others available for ASP/.net/MS-SQL Some of those I've listed above are more popular than others, and have a large selection of stylish layouts already available, though you can freely create your own. My preference is textpattern, though the others might be more friendly to beginners. On designing your website, I'd recomend looking at the templates available to start with, some decent tutorials on html/css which are essential for making templates can be found here: http://www.htmldog.com/ and a reasonable reference for all the basics things about everything: http://www.w3schools.com/ If your too independent to use blogger and too tight to pay for hosting, you can always host it on your DSL line as long as youve got a static IP.. but I don't recomend this unless youre really really geeky
^^ what he said, i like wordpress from what i have seen. http://www.tizag.com/ <-- they are good for tutorials.
http://www.no-ip.com/ run a nice service in case you are hosting the site on your computer they give you a program that checks if your ip has changed and fixes it so that your site always works no matter what ip oh and thanks for the helpful links
Sorry for the 2 in a row Hey, Just a note, is there any other, easy enough way top learn that will give me more power and maybe be slightly more functional, i dont mind trying to learn stuff, but i'd prefer if it weren't coding, if i had the time i would learn coding but i'd imagine it takes ages! And also, is there any way i can build offline using any of them programs available or am i dreaming? lol Thanks, Stuart
A few months ago, I made a site on Adobe Imageready based on slicing the pictures made up into smaller pictures and then imported them into a working site on dreamweaver. The site was painfully slow though as it had to load up all the pictures, maybe this is a good way to go but keep it simple. Also, it was very hard to update, so is probably not a great idea for you thinking about it... Heh, just have a go at things, search on google for tutorials etc. I'm in no way good at making websites though, I have no idea about all the different things you can use... text entering tools etc. Meh... have fun! www.primehosting.co.uk is an up and coming UK hosting site. I found it great to use, hosting comes with cPanel for easy editing.