**Help me Please**
I am hoping to build my first website. I understand HTML, but I do not know where you use this HTML to make a web page. I do not have Microsoft Frontpage so what should I use?
Suggestions Appreciated
Suggestions Appreciated
0
Comments
Type your code into notepad, save it as xxxxxx.htm and upload it to your webserver.
Here's another thing I don't understand, once I've actually designed my site, how do I get it put on the net?
Wow!
Well if you want to design a site, a program like front page is what you need. to get you files online you need a web host and a domain name, you might be able to getaway with one of those free web sites like freewebs.com or something like that. Web sites are not something you can just throw up and call done in 5 minutes. Especially if you’re coding it from scratch. If you use Front page or Dreamweaver you don't need to know HTML as it does it all for you. I wish i could help more, But I suggest go down to a local book store and get web sites for dummies or HTML for dummies...they are great books if you want to learn how to do something. Unless you are dummy
a side note: http://www.bfmetournaments.com
I created the layout of this site in Photoshop using what they call slices, if you notice when the site loads it loads little piece of it. This is called a image based website. Too do this you need to get into a program that can do Slices. like Image Ready by Adobe
The HTML code just references in the slices in order and makes the website. So the code just calls on a file in a folder and shows it to the world. It is very easy once you know the basic principles.
here is a snippit of the html code: this might look confusing to you:
Look at attached file
the text is a few buttons on the top of the site, you can see where the buttons are linked to and what iumage is being called to show that slice.
Now that I have confused you
It sounds like you need an html design/layout program such as dreamweaver, golive, or frontpage.
SledgeHammer has given you some really good advice, so I'd go with that.
Domain: A domain is a Name that is tied to a fixed IP address, that you advertise to direct people to your website. i.e. short-media.com = Short Medias domain name
Web Host: A Web Host is either free or you are charged to be able to park your domain and upload Files Via FTP so your web page that you created using HTML can be seen by the world. Most Web host will park your domain give you so much storage for the files of your webpage and even give you e-mail address that will go with your domain. Like [email]Dan_P@Dan_P.com[/email] ....
If you have a program like Dreamweaver or FrontPage you can link your FTP folder from your Web host so you can upload files straight out of your HTML program.
Before I continue, I would like to take this time to recomend you to finding a book about web design, I am pretty sure almost any book you find will be good. I'll also give you a few helpful websites....
htmlgoodies.com
pixel2life.com
csszengarden.com
OK, building websites is a fun and exiting road to take. There is far more you can do than many imagine or even realize. To some others they might even realize there is more to it than what they had figured to be "an easy ordeal" as a co-worker seems to think.
You can know all the coding in the world and still make a horrible site, it's about being creative and doing enough of something to have people come back. Making eye-candy is nice, but after a couple visits a person can become bored and never return. I have a somewhat funny story about my "clan" webpage. Yes, I belong to a so-called "Clan"... but to be more accurate, I used to belong to one. We're basically now just buds playing games together becuase we know eachother very well, similarly to Short-Media. To try an make this long story short(and get to the point of it all) we get made fun of becuase our "clan site" is so plain, it's really just a phpBB site with the default template. So yeah, it's very plain. But it also *gets to the point and serves our purpose*. We're not a real clan, so we don't go around recruiting like most of these younger guys who take this stuff to seriously. But here is the big point.... many people visit our site and frequent the forums for the information they need about our server and such. If we wanted to, hell yeah we could make an amazing site. Most the guys in our clan have YEARS of coding and web development experience, amoungst other skills.
Another point I'd like to make.... be original. Most of these other guys use "templates" which is like using a template for a resume.... it begins to become familiar to some. It's funny becuase those are the same guys who make fun of us for being "plain".
I know that story is a bit long, but I am not that great at slimming down a story either. I hope you got the point of that so I may continue with everything I would like to say about web design and development.
You say you know HTML, but you don't really get how it all works from what I see in your posts. I think I recall that point in my life, not knowing how to go further. I'd like to help. A book will help alot, in fact I know one good book that could get you going really well. It's called "Creating Web Sites" it's one of the "Bible" series books(the really fat ones). It shows how the internet works and how to build sites, then eventually how to build sites like eBay. I haven't read through it fully, I just bought it figuring I'd use it as a resource... and it's done a decent job at that too. BTW.... books, even if you don't read through them; are great for those quick look up and figure out issues you will come across when you forget how to do something.
OK so you'd like to put your current knowledge to use? You don't need any super powerful programs like Dreamweaver. Personally, I would never use Frontpage, but my understanding is that it's come a long way since I last used it. But it's still a MS product which I don't trust due to certain Internet Explorer issues that haunt web developers. But I ain't here to debate on that issue. I would say that if you're trying to progress your understanding in web developement, then using Notepad may be the best thing you can do as a beginner, Dreamweaver is an alternative though as well.
Let me explain.
First with Notepad; with this very small yet infinitly powerful program you're limited only by your knowledge and skills. You're knowledge being what you know, and skills being everything else, including the ability to find information. By that I mean that if you don't know how to place code that puts and image on your site, then you can look it up. Knowledge being that you already know how to do that. The only down side is speed, I used to adore the "guru" feeling I got when using Notepad to build a site. And it taught me so much becuase I would have to figure it all out on my own.
Now with Dreamweaver; of course this can count for other WYSIWYG Editers, but most significantly.... Dreamweaver. I love this program. There is nothing that could replace it in terms of web developement. When you code it sees what you're doing and brings up quick selection boxes to allow you to finish typing your code without the worry of a Type-O, of course after getting used to it and where things are at in the menu's you get to know how to actually develope at a much faster pace than what you can normally type it out on your own. In this same method a beginner can also... more or less.... learn how to code better as they SEE what should be placed. Though, nothing nearly as well as learning with notepad. Some might disagree, but they cannot disagree that using this as the only way of learning is NO GOOD.
The only real issue is that when I get into more advanced stuff, and I am no expert yet, I am an intermediate web developer; like PHP you pretty much want to type out by hand anyways. But I am unsure if you care about that so I won't mention anymore on that subject.
So once you get the site you want done, you'd want to upload it. Uploading can cuase many issue's with beginners that have no clue about what relative or absolute paths are.... instead of me telling you, I feel the best thing you can do is to look it up and figure out what those terms mean and how it can mess you up. To upload, I personally like SmartFTP, it's a nitfy program and easy to use and figure out. You login to your webhost, like say if you have a Sarcnet based host(insert blatant advertisement for Sarcnet Industries
Get my point?
Sarcnet is Short Media's webhost, as well as mine and many others here. It's owned by Prime and let me tell you he's a hell of a guy. They could help you out alot in terms of getting your site uploaded so listen to prime when you can
Of course a Domain would be you getting a name like "mysite.com", what happens is that you buy the name from a site like "godaddy.com" and then that name gets directed to your webhost like Sarcnet, where your site is stored. To make it easy to understand.....
To a person, they see "http://www.mysite.com/index.htm". To a computer, it see's "192.168.0.1/index.htm". Of course on a side note.... 192.168.0.1 is actually a local IP and you'd never see it on the internet, only an Intranet
P.S can you use tables and frames when using notepad?
You can right php and asp server side scripting pages.
JavaScript, etc.
Basic layout of a basic webpage.
[PHP]
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>Your website name</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>
<body>
<h1><center>Welcome to my site</center></h1>
<center>
<p>The text you want on your page </p>
<table width="75%" border="1">
<tr>
<td>Name</td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Age</td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Gamertag</td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Phone Number:</td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Email Address</td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
</table>
<br>
<script>
function platformDetect() { if(navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Win") != -1) {
alert("Windows"); } else if(navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Mac") != -1) { alert("Macintosh");
} else alert("Other"); }
</script>
<input name="Close" type="submit" id="Close" value="Close">
<br>
</center>
<center>©Your Company Name</center>
</body>
</html>
[/PHP]
paste this code into notepad and save it as html and you will start to understand how bothe the code and layout work to gether.
Did you just type that off the top of your head or did you have to look up the code for the things you want to include? So say if i wanted to have links to all the different locations of my website down the left hand side, how would you do that?
You need to get a book.... It is very hard to teach someone how to do something over a forum As much as I would like to help I don't have time to write the 400 pages I would need to break down how to build a site. Reading is going to be your only hope start with the basics, and when you have questions lets us Know we will be here to answer.
I never had anyone teach me how to build a website, I just read and bought tutorials from online or just trial and error methods. Like I said before it is time consuming and you must be patient.
Doug
There are several webservers you can set up on your home computer, but understand that they're very resource intensive (especially if you intend to use them with databases etc.). I am taking a webscripting class this fall, and I have XAMPP set up on my laptop, it's very easy to configure, but, like I said, is resource intensive.
It's called local host.
THis is how you set it up using windows IIS6.0 (I use apache 1.33 and IIS6.0 you can't use both at the same time)
IIS
open up IIS
then go to local website or website.
Right click it then go to properties then directory then set the directory to the folder on your harddrive(s) that you want the website to be on.
create a index.html, index.asp, index.php, etc in the folders root directory.(with some html of course)
then make sure you hit the play button in ISS to activate the webstie.
THen open up your webbrowser and type in "http:/localhost"
then you have your website.
As for your question about links you have to type
<a href="http://yourwebsite.com/#whatever">The name of the link</a>
and yes I just typed that stuff in the quick reply box it's simple after you get used to ding html for a long time.
Now I am trying to learn PHP, MySQL, ASP, CSS, MS SQL, MS Exchange Server, Red HAt Linux Enterprise, Apache and Windows Server 2003 Enterprise,etc.
so I can start a business doing these things for fun and make some money.
I already make money for developing websites for people.
I'm personally not a fan of IIS, if only because it's hated me in the past. Several times I've tried to set it up on different Windows systems (one on Server 2000, one on XP Pro specifically) that just broke constantly. Apache is my thing, XAMPP is a package that includes Apache, PHP, and MySQL in an easy to install format.
In any case, IIS isn't my favorite.
YES! RWB YOU ARE MY HERO!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OMG~! YES! YES! NOTEPAD ALL THE WAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HAHAHAHHAHAHA! DEATH TO WYSIWG!