best way of building a website for a noob

[Ulysses]

Hiya guys

 

Seeing as some of you lot are ace at building sites, can you kindly advise me what is the best way of building a site when your a noob at web building...as I am thinking of buying webplus 10 from serif....seeing as I dont know HTML code...or is there a better way??

 

 

[TetsuoShima]

Learn a bit of html.

Really, no joke.

It isn't hard to do and you'll be better able to get what you want. :)

[Megalith]

yeah i would have to agree with TetsuoShima.

 

If you want to spend some money on software get dreamweaver its help files alone would have you quickly up and running with html.

 

equally importantly to 'better able to get what you want' as TetsuoShima says is 'better able to change what you want'

 

there are numerous free templates that can often be a good starting point for web design but code knowledge is essential even if all you want to do is put youre logo in the top left of a page.

 

there are also open source server based software like joomla which allow you to create complicated websites much like a newspaper style.

[S0V13T]

Dreamweaver does cost about 400 pounds, so I would call that 'spending a lot of money'. not spending 'some' money.

 

If you do a Google search for "open source wysiwyg html editor" you'll find a huge list of quality applications that will do the job, for free. I've used nvu ( www.nvu.com/ ) in the past, and never had a problem with it.

 

wysiwyg = What You See is What You Get

[NiteShdw]

It's not just HTML, you need to learn CSS as well.  There are some great tutorials.  I would recommend searching for websites that have basic CSS based layouts.  These usually consist of a header, one to three columns, and a footer.  Once you have the layout, you can then add the content.

[Megalith]

lol tbh i use about 4 diff editors each has uses that others dont.

 

Open source is always a great option as S0V says and it has the added advantage of being free and legal.

 

My dreamweaver came from one of them torrent things tbh but i mostly use VS.NET2 (which i own) with a php plugin it has better error finding functions than dreamweaver but it's a *!%£ to run sometimes.

 

Oh and yeah Notepad++(open source notepad replacement (http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/about.php) with 100's of features extensions & plugins - including line numbers lol ;) ) is very very useful but yeah you need to know HTML, CSS, PHP and other languages to fully take advantage of this extremely useful and highly recommended tool, sadly it is only available for Windoze tho.

 

[Gamer98]

If you just want to try and play around with dreamweaver and what no they do offer a 30 day trial. This is what I am going through for so if you want to try some of the other applications we have used Photoshop Dreamweaver Illustrator Notepad I also use Notepad + which is a great program. For a walk through book we have used http://www.amazon.com/XHTML-Sixth-Visual-Quickstart-Guide/dp/0321430840/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/002-9007523-5187232?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1178571485&sr=1-2 as a reference and a Book a few others like PHP 5 and what not.

[Tinned_Tuna]

Well, the simplest way (if you don't want to start from scratch) would be to use Wordpress or Joomla! (or moveable type, or any of the other CMS/Blogging platforms) And get a nice template.

 

Once you've got it up, I'd say learn CSS/HTML/PHP and see if you can work out how to tweak your new site (keep a working backup!). You'll learn a lot this way, if you stick at it.

 

[feluxe]

If you are lazy I'd recommend Dreamweaver. I made a site with it without knowing ANY html. (But now I know html and css and jsp and java; its better to know html; you have more freedom in creating sites cause there are some restrictions when using graphical editors and they sometimes produce bad or unneccessary code)