jrok72 Posted December 30, 2003 Share Posted December 30, 2003 Need help from the vast wisdom of the superior people out there. <enuff kissing up> I got my camera, took some pic's, got 10mb of space to play with. Now all I need is a program to teach this newbie how to build a site. All advise is greatly appreciated. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Morgramen Posted December 30, 2003 Share Posted December 30, 2003 My advise is: DO NOT USE FRONTPAGE! Dreamweaver is a popular choice for WYSIWYG editors. (It generally acts just like a word processor) and you don't need to know any code to use it. Which is why I wouldn't use if you actually want to learn HTML (or XHTML nowadays I guess.) It's not bad if you actually pay atention to the code view and try to figure out what tag does which, but it's fairly easy to ignore it all and concentrate on what you're doing, and you end up learning nothing. Notepad works fantastically, and you already most likely have it. Just open a new document and start typing out code. HTML is basically regular text, with little "tag words" that you use to wrap your content between. For instance, you could put a line of text in the center of the page by simply typing: <html> <head> <title>My PAge</title> </head> <body> <div align="center">This is my website!</div> </body> </html> There are a ton of tutorial sites out there for writing html. It's terribly easy. It's generally the fancy stuff - not to mention the actual design part!) that proves hard. EDIT: OOPS! Forgot to say that you have to save any html pages you build with notepad as file type: ALL and when you name it, include either .htm or .html at the end of the name. Use underscores as well if you want spaces in the document title. (The file name actually becomes the url of the page once you upload it to your web space.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jrok72 Posted December 30, 2003 Author Share Posted December 30, 2003 Thanks, I was looking to avoid relearning any code. Been 15 years since I have tried writing any. I'll keep my eye out for Dreamweaver. And start playing around writing some stuff. The pain at the back of my eyes is starting again. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kheprera Posted December 30, 2003 Share Posted December 30, 2003 Don't use a program. Instead, get the book "HTML for Dummies" or one of the Peachtree HTML books. This will make life much simpler and you learn handcoding, a tool that will help you in jobs. Then you can just use notepad to code all your pages. And a word of advice... NEVER, EVER USE WORD !! Word sucks, even though it says it does HTML, it adds in extraneous, unnecessary coding that ends up making a complete mess of your page and you'll end up having to spend more time removing the ugly code than it would have taken you to put in the good code yourself. Just avoid most MS products if at all possible. Dreamweaver is okay, but I've experienced problems with the MX version (I had to use it at work). It's a bear at times and has a pretty severe learning curve if you're brand new to HTMLizing. HTML for Dummies and Notepad are the easiest ways I know of to do code. Simple, clean, efficient. Handcoding rocks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Star Drifter Posted December 30, 2003 Share Posted December 30, 2003 It's really not that hard to learn at all. The newest versions of Frontpage (professional) are nice and easy enough, plus they don't add too much bloated code. There are also three modes of viewing: the WYSIWYG mode, an instant preview mode, and a mode for editing raw code. It's actually a good balance between a program for beginners and advanced users alike. However, it's probably also very expensive. Your favorite word processor/office suite probably has a built in webpage editor. OpenOffice has a presentation program which makes interesting enough webpages. Office apps won't make the prettiest pages, but will work. You might also try to dig around Netscape's ftp site for NS Communicator 4.7x, which came with a built in webpage editor. It was a pretty good one as well. Overall, I do advise learning HTML. It's the only way to truly make a site your own. There are enough good alternatives, though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ghost Rider Posted December 30, 2003 Share Posted December 30, 2003 I prefer Arachnophilia. It's a nice little free program that will help you thru creating your site. I will try to post the link when I get that computer powered up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flit Posted December 30, 2003 Share Posted December 30, 2003 If you are not rich, you might want to bypass the "do it for you" programs. I used HTML Goodies and Notepad to do my site. It wasn't that hard, I hadn't done any "programming" since the '80's and playing around with BASIC on the Commodore 64. No counting to figure out how old that makes me! It's rude! The Commodore is still in the garage.....somewhere...... Anyway, back on-topic, the site isn't anything real fancy and it is due for an update as soon as I finish some other projects. It does what I wanted it to though. It gets pics of my minis where the whole world can see them. At least the part of the world that cares and is paying attention (ie a very small part of it ) Check out the link in my sig if you are interested in what can be done in a short time by someone who really doesn't know what they are doing. Hope it helps! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Errex Posted December 30, 2003 Share Posted December 30, 2003 Well, I used Frontpage for my own site. As pointed out, you don't really learn anything useful, but it's fairly easy to use. If you are not too keen on coding the site yourself, I'd recommend it, but, otherwise, the HTML for Dummies book is really a good investment. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ladystorm Posted December 30, 2003 Share Posted December 30, 2003 I prefer Arachnophilia. It's a nice little free program that will help you thru creating your site. Arachnophilia I use it too. I do the bulk of my pages in it and then pop open the code and tweak it to suit. cher Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jrok72 Posted December 30, 2003 Author Share Posted December 30, 2003 Again Thank you! I want to do something simple and realitivity easy. Been busy repacing stuff and getting back into the swing of work/painting/Evercrack. Trying to stay away from MS products I always hated the idea of paying top dollar to be a beta tester. Going to look at the mentioned items, copy and paste the instructions and try to not to look foolish when I get one built. Again thanks, I luv you all Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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