Making your on web site?

[scrollersmoke]

O.K. i have seen other peoples web site and i have seen where someone wants to do them. My qustion is how do you go about doing it.
i have pagebreeze and coffiecup html editors but cant figure them out does anybody no of a tutiroual on these or other programs?
Or anywhere where a man can inf info on doing one. I think it would be cool to have one just dont no nothing about it.
any help will be appreciated.
Rick

[Gill]

'Sfunny you should mention this, Rick. I'm pondering the same problem, but in my case I've got Dreamweaver MX 2004.

Gill

[CanadianScroller]

Once again I have to promote products from Serif.
I sure wish I got paid for it
I did my page with PagePlus the desktop publishing software. It provides WYSIWYG.. or what you see is what you get.
They also have a free program at http://freeserifsoftware.com/ Check out the dedicated website software there. It will even manage the uploads and maintenance of your site.

They have some great templates that are easy to use.
My own site took maybe a night to build

[workin for wood]

I don't know much, but one very very important fact. Do not let your wife/husband build and/or maintain your website. That's guaranteed to be the recipe for WWIII...and that's not a joke!

[GrayBeard Phil]

Rick:

What I Know Is (WIKI):

The first step has two parts: getting a web page domain registered, and securing an Internet Service provider (ISP) to agree to assign you an IP address for the domain page. Usually, nowadays, your ISP may register your name space (domain) for a very small fee for you.

These steps need to be done almost together, and can get bogged down in technology that you will never need to know after the fact. So, paying a few dollars is not a bad investment.

Aside: Google for WHOIS, and several web pages will result. (many will want to leave adware/spyware cookies, so be aware) When you go to these sites, you enter a domain name, for example scrollsaw-trinkets.com, or www.scrollsaw-trinkets.com, and the WHOIS search engine will tell you if anyone has reserved or is using that web address for their page. If the domain name is unused, you or anyone may pay a small fee to reserve or use the name for your personal web page.

You can also try to register top level domain names that end in .biz as well as .com. I think in the UK they use scrollsaw-trinkets.com.uk or some such scheme for web pages.

To complete your registration of your web page, you need to tell the company that registers you name the IP address (that is a set of 4 numbers 0-255, in the format of xxx.yyy.sss.vvv) of you ISP's domain name cross reference to real IP address servers. Thus when some computer asks where to find your web page, there is a way your web page can be found using IP addresses. Your ISP, can provide that information when you contract thru them for your web page IP address. There is a 72 hour minimum time delay between when you tell your Domain Register the address of you Name Server and when the web knows about this. This news must be updated throughout the WEB.

To save a lot of grief, let us pretend you decide to let your ISP host your web page, and register you site name through your ISP for a $20.00 fee. Then, Your ISP should give you directions on how to upload a web page(s) to their web server. Unfortunately these instructions will be written in Techno speak, a sub-dialect of no known language except to Techno-Geeks.

Basically, you create your web page using a software application, and once made, you upload the file to your ISP's web server. Your page is now on the Web.

Trust me, I skipped a WHOLE lot of details; well actually I skipped whole chapters, not just a few paragraphs.

Phil

[PeteB]

I built my website with free software from my ISP, and it is full of HTML coding errors that I am unable to fix by editing.

I am thinking of importing my site into Coffee Cup in order to repair it. What I like about Coffee Cup is that you can switch between WYSIWYG and HTML editing, and I think this feature is possibly confusing you. The WYSIWYG editing is pretty easy to use, I think.

Pete

[PuzzledMoose]

Aside from what Phil said which was perfectly good advice - if you're not bothered about having a top-level domain, there are quite a lot of places where you can get free webspace, without having to register a domain. There are a number of problem with a lot of these :
a) they have ads attached to them - often those irritating pop-ups!
b) you are tied to designing onscreen with their editors, which are often not great, and stuck with often a limited range of templates.
c) the amount of space you get is restricted
d) your URL is often so convoluted that noone will ever remember it

One free one that I mentioned last week in another post that seems pretty good as far as I can see is 110mb.com. It doesn't suffer from any of the above problems and seems to be rated pretty highly by those that use it.

The URL they give you is "yourname".110MB.com - which even I can remember..lol Mine is www.puzzledmoose.110mb.com and anyone is welcome to take a look - but it certainly isn't a finished product just yet! I got sidetracked into playing with stylesheets, guestbooks and gallery creation software ..lol

If you don't know anything about HTML there are plenty of online tutorials around which are pretty good. You don't need to know it if you use a web site creation prog but a basic knowledge does help at times. Kinda like driving a car - you don't need to know how it all works but it can help when something goes wrong ...

[PuzzledMoose]

I built my website with free software from my ISP, and it is full of HTML coding errors that I am unable to fix by editing.

Pete

Pete, if you know what the errors are, can't you just open up the webpage in a text editor like Notepad and fix them there? Or are you saying that you are getting errors if you try to validate the code?

[MikeDingas]

It's been awhile since I've done a webpage and I'm sure things have moved along since. However, there are concepts and design practices that you will not understand simply by using a WYSIWYG editor. For example, limiting the file size of each page and the size of images; organizing your site to facilitate a friendly experience; providing an on-line catalog; shopping carts; promoting your site; etc.

Build it and they will come is bogus. You'll have gazillions of other websites to compete with. Do yourself a favor and do some reseach and reading before you leap into it. A poorly designed site is a waste of time and energy.

[PuzzledMoose]

I'm not arguing with what you say there at all Mike if the main purpose of the website is commercial - and for any site clear navigation and file size considerations are important.

Not all sites are though .. when I started fiddling about with mine again the main purpose at present was to easily let family in England see what I'd been cutting ..lol

What do you mean ""built it and they will come" is bogus" ? - it worked in the movie ..

[PeteB]

Pete, if you know what the errors are, can't you just open up the webpage in a text editor like Notepad and fix them there? Or are you saying that you are getting errors if you try to validate the code?

I tried editing a page once, and managed to turn it into gibberish.

Being a non-wizard with HTML, I'd be lost without an authoring/management program. What I like about the Coffee Cup proggie is that it works much like the one I have, but tests the code for W3C validation, a good deal for $49.

It's not a huge rush, but I would like to add proper headers and get rid of validation errors. Maybe a spring project.

Your site looks good, Ian!

Pete

[Gill]

I've been dabbling with Nvu this evening, an Open Source (ie free!) WYSIWYG HTML editor. So far it appears to be just what I'm after .

I like the looks of 110mb.com - thanks for the tip, Ian . Oh, and I enjoyed visiting your site too.

Gill

[Minnesota scroller]

Ian, I like the looks of your site. It's coming along very well. It's fast loading and easy to navigate. Notify us when it's near completion.

However, I'll stick to uploading photos of my work to Photobucket.com and just direct people to their site. It's free and not frustrating or time consuming.

[PuzzledMoose]

I tried editing a page once, and managed to turn it into gibberish.

Been there done that ..lol

Being a non-wizard with HTML, I'd be lost without an authoring/management program. What I like about the Coffee Cup proggie is that it works much like the one I have, but tests the code for W3C validation, a good deal for $49.

Did you know you can validate your pages online too at http://validator.w3.org/ - it will either validate by URL or by file upload ..

It's not a huge rush, but I would like to add proper headers and get rid of validation errors. Maybe a spring project.

I read something I didn't know about headers the other day. It was saying that more and more search engine bots are looking at the content of pages on sites rather than just the Meta tags. The other point it made is that if your header info is wrong, the bots will just ignore your page completely. Sounds like a good reason for getting them right. (And mine are certainly NOT right at the moment - in fact none existent on some pages... lol)

Your site looks good, Ian!

Pete

Thanks Pete. Not too much there yet but the structure seems to work OK.

[PuzzledMoose]

I've been dabbling with Nvu this evening, an Open Source (ie free!) WYSIWYG HTML editor. So far it appears to be just what I'm after .

I like the looks of 110mb.com - thanks for the tip, Ian . Oh, and I enjoyed visiting your site too.

Gill

Thanks Gill - hey why didn't you sign my guestbook?

I downloaded NVu the other day too , but haven't tried to use it yet. Free is always good ... The Puzzled Moose graphic at the top of my pages, the menu and the gallery were all done with various bits of free software ... it's amazing what good stuff is out there for free. Call me scrooge ....lol