First Website

[Kiroy]

No need for a new thread - I have 0 web building skills, and want to put together a simple website. Simple like drudgereport simple. DRUDGE REPORT 2007®

I was thinking about getting the domain name and server space on godaddy, that a good move? And would any site building programs out there let someone like me with no skills put linked words on a white page?

Thanks.

[Buckaroo Banzai]

I know very little about web creation, however I went with Lunarpages to host the bulk of it. It's really quite cheap, and they give you TONS of space. I've used them for almost 3 years now.
They come with a basic software system that lets you do basic text, etc. I only played around with it before grabbing Dreamweaver which really is the best for people like me who are inept at coding/html.
If you're familiar with Photoshop basics, you can handle Dreamweaver just fine. It basically just uses photoshop layers, and thats about it.
I put my site together in about a weekend.

[Ham n Cheese]

No new thread either. CSS question.

When looking at CSS templates, how do I go about editing these the "right" way? My own basic knowledge is HTML, so my initial instinct to take over is to go in and start editing the source code in the index and what have you to fit my liking. Though with CSS aren't all the pages somehow linked together, so you only have to change a link in a navigation bar once or something? Really uneducated with them, but found some CSS templates I want to use without turning them into pure html editing sessions heh

[Laladilya]

Originally Posted by Kiroy

No need for a new thread - I have 0 web building skills, and want to put together a simple website. Simple like drudgereport simple. DRUDGE REPORT 2007®

I was thinking about getting the domain name and server space on godaddy, that a good move? And would any site building programs out there let someone like me with no skills put linked words on a white page?

Thanks.

I got a friend on GoDaddy and he seems to be ok with it. Never complained anyway.

If you need it to archive and stuff I'd go with a CMS... you can test out various ones on Open Source CMS and see if you like any of them. Joomla I think was mentioned earlier is pretty good, it's most likely super overkill for what you need though.

If you just want to make a page with links and don't want to decorate it much CuteHTML would probably work. Last time I checked it was free. Anything more complex you'd want to probably get Dreamweaver or GoLive, unless you wanted to learn the actual code.

[Ham n Cheese]

Don't get webspace at godaddy. One of the companies I'm commissioned for uses them and constantly has problems with their web mail and their web client is a pain in the ass. Dreamhost on the other hand has been nothing but A+++ in every category for me and any issues I've had and is basically the nicest customer support I've ever encountered (in any line of business)

[Laladilya]

Originally Posted by Ham n Cheese

No new thread either. CSS question.

When looking at CSS templates, how do I go about editing these the "right" way? My own basic knowledge is HTML, so my initial instinct to take over is to go in and start editing the source code in the index and what have you to fit my liking. Though with CSS aren't all the pages somehow linked together, so you only have to change a link in a navigation bar once or something? Really uneducated with them, but found some CSS templates I want to use without turning them into pure html editing sessions heh

Yeah, the CSS files are usually separated from the html so you can have one stylesheet define the entire site. Up the the head tags you should see something like :

< link href="assets/CSS/screen.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" />

Then the way it actually modifies the html, in the stylesheet something like :

p {

color:#000000;
font-weight:bold;

}

That will change all the paragraph tags in your html document black and bold them. That way if you have like 40 different html pages linking to that one CSS file you can change that one style and it updates all the paragraphs to the new color. Or it could be the background graphic on the navigation bar, the header... etc. Its kind of similar to includes with php, coldfusion, etc if you're familiar with those. The entire idea is to separate the content from the design, so that the html is cleaner and you don't have to go around editing 4 billion font tags across 40 pages.

You can also designate different stylesheets to the same html page that format it for different things. Print stylesheets are pretty handy and designating a different stylesheet to format the page for phones is kinda nice too. A List Apart has some print stylesheets set - if you go there and do a print-preview you can see that all the navigation stuff is removed and everything is reformatted to suit printing better even though its using the exact same html file as what you see on screen.

Thats the basic idea anyway. Theres obviously more complex stuff, particularly if you start getting into floats/positioning and trying to support people still using IE6, which is a nightmare. =/

[Tyen]

Wordpress, Drupal (if you have Vbulletin), and Joomla is totally win if you know nothing about web design but need to make a site.

[Candiarie]

Yeah Lala did a pretty good job of covering it Ham. For basic stuff, all of the pages can reference a single CSS file (which describes what attributes you want to apply to certain tags) and then in each HTML page you have you'll tag sections (like paragraph, navbar and so on) so it knows where to apply those attributes. It can get complicated pretty fast though and I had problems just understanding how to get the attributes to do what I wanted for one page. But I've never really been interested or skilled at web design in the least bit. I started off at zen garden and their resources aren't too shabby.

[Ham n Cheese]

So basically the CSS is just going to change the basic stuff from page to page? The substituting for content and pictures (ala a store type site) is still done in the basic html body and not the style sheet?

[Fog]

Originally Posted by Ham n Cheese

So basically the CSS is just going to change the basic stuff from page to page? The substituting for content and pictures (ala a store type site) is still done in the basic html body and not the style sheet?

Content and pictures are going to be in the HTML. Colors, fonts, and positioning are in the CSS.