Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

Making websites, for complete beginners

(1/3) > >>

m_s:
I'm just starting up a small consultancy, aiming to help people in getting online safely and keeping their information secure and their computers bug-free.  (The background is that I am re-training, and I need to make some money to pay for my course.)  I've just bought a domain name, and I want to get a website up and running in the next month or so.  But I am a complete beginner - I once designed a three-page website as part of my work, using FrontPage, but that was extremely ugly and a little ropey.  Can anyone advise me of (1) any easy-to-understand and straightforward website-making tools (you see, I don't even know the right names!), and (2) any simple course or set of hints and tips I might find online - for design and structure, and then for more esoteric (to me) things like upping ranking on search-engines (I think there's something on this over at lifehacker today, so I'll go check that out next).  Any suggestions much appreciated...

mouser:
someone asked a while ago for some freeware web design tool reviews -
i think it's long overdue that we try to at least have a good thread about designing websites, tools and books.
there has to be some good websites dedicated to beginer website design.
let's try to find some and add alink to the links page as well.

i think big apps like dreamweaver are way overkill.

here is what i have learned about web design:

1) it is EXTREMELY EASY to do the basics - design pages with simple text and graphics, upload pages and files, etc.
people don't realize how easy it is to do the basics, it's no more difficult with some free easy tools to edit a web page just like you are using a word processor.

2) it is EXTREMELY TIME CONSUMING AND FRUSTRATING to make a really nice looking site that uses things like CSS and has custom layout stuff which looks good in different browsers and has lots of content.
people don't realize how time consuming and how much tweaking is required to get some of these more subtle effects to work properly.


Depending on how professional you want the site to look, a good approach might be to try to locate an existing "template", either freee or cheap (there are lots of sites on the web selling millions of website templates).  It will also depend on how many pages you want to link together how many different looks it will have.

btw FontPage seems to get good marks by many reviewers; if you've used it before, FrontPage might really deserve revisiting.

some other piece of advice:
1) i try to avoid all flash menus and weird menus and effects - some people don't like them or won't want to enable those features.
2) keep in mind that people surf the web with diffferent resolutions on their screen; make sure you don't design pages that look good at one resolution but horrible at another.


i'd still love to hear recommendations for free software to work on web design.
a good toolbox would include:
1) web page editor
2) ftp program or even better a smart web page uploader (might be included in #1)
3) web log analyzer

kfitting:
Similar to Frontpage but free: NVU (http://www.nvu.com/).  Frontpage makes some pretty lousy html, though it does seem to be easy to use.  I used AceHTML before (its not WYSIWYG, but it allows easier hand coding).  I havent done any html in awhile though...

Kevin

m_s:
Thanks, kfitting - NVU is great!  I've got a holding page up now, thanks to your help...  Much appreciated.

I've looked at a few templates, seen a few things I like.  Forgive me if this is a really dumb question, but I come across so many sites lately that seem to be built on blog templates - and many of the designs are really nice.  Is this an option - using blogging software and templates to build a website?

Miles:
Anybody have experience of this?
http://www.easygen.com/

Miles

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page