Designing Web Pages

[macb]

Lets say I am a beginner and want to teach my self about creating web pages, which would be the best software or programme to use ?

I know there is coffee cup and Front page Editor :

Any input would be gratefully received

[bangkokrick]

Lets say I am a beginner and want to teach my self about creating web pages, which would be the best software or programme to use ?

I know there is coffee cup and Front page Editor :

Any input would be gratefully received

Try Macromedia Dreamweaver its a very powerful program and quite easy to use.

Cheers Rick

[villagefarang]

Lets say I am a beginner and want to teach my self about creating web pages, which would be the best software or programme to use ?

I know there is coffee cup and Front page Editor :

Any input would be gratefully received

The easiest way to set up a web page, (if you have an Apple) is iWeb. At least that is what I ended up using. Very integrated with all Apple software and has decent templates.

There are many flash programs out there, though I don't know which is best. Flash does seem to be the in thing right now and is cross platform I believe.

Edited August 10, 2007 by villagefarang

[A_Traveller]

If your looking for software to assist in a 'point & click' build manner, might be worth looking at NetObjects Fusion 10 {for Windows only}. Am told it has developed well over the last few editions, I used it to 'run up' a quick temporary site a few years ago, and the site was good enough to stay as it was for about a year before being migrated to a database set up.

You can also, like Dreamweaver download a test version for 30 days.

By the by Dreamweaver is great if you have designs and ideas in mind, NetObjects is more 'template' based, horses for courses.

Regards

Link

[Plus]

Dreamweaver is very expensive, so it Frontpage .

If you want to really learn how to design webpages you should probably start typing the code yourself rather than rely on these drag and drop editors and develop bad habits right from the start.

All you need is Notepad to type and something like CoreFTP to upload.

There are three basic parts to it - code, look, and upload. Code needs to be shown in different colors - a lot easier to work with, and code needs to be checked for mistakes - validated. That's all you need from the editor.

"Look" is the most difficult and most expensive part for editors but you'd be better off checking you design directly on the Internet with a browser. It's a pain in the ass when you discover that your perfect pages in Dreamweaver look totally screwed up on the Internet. What went wrong? Where was the mistake? This kind of forensics is often frustrating and time consuming.

The third part is upload - it's of course very easy if your editor can upload your pages in one click, but it's equally easy to do this one click in a separate FTP (file transfer protocol) program, a very small trade off.

So, while Dreamweaver and FrontPage offer complete solutions, it's not so difficult to break the job into smaller steps.

I was kidding when I said Notepad, btw.

Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_editor

You can surely find something there for free or open source that would suit you.

[villagefarang]

You might also want to get your own domain name at some place like godaddy. Just under $9 a year for most .com names. Anything will be an improvement from using Yahoo, though that is and easy way to go.

[bkkmadness]

Dreamweaver is very expensive, so it Frontpage .

OP is in Thailand.

If you want to really learn how to design webpages you should probably start typing the code yourself rather than rely on these drag and drop editors and develop bad habits right from the start.

Tricky for a beginner I would have thought.

What the website for MacB, a few pages about the family? Are you trying to get into building websites to make money?

Let us know what level you want to make sites at and you will probably get better advice.

[Tywais]

I was kidding when I said Notepad, btw.

Years ago when the web was still in its' infancy, that's exactly what I used to write pages with. Still good to use when going through the following tutorials. I later switched to Coffee Cup then now Dreamweaver for the last few years, don't have time to hand code pages anymore.

http://www.pagetutor.com/html_tutor/index.html

http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/myfirstsite/myfirstpage.html

http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/campus/1924/

//Edit - Actually if you have Office 2003 or later, you can use MS Word to build your page and then export it as a web page if you want something quick. Don't recommend it for large projects due to the amount of junk MS puts into the html code.

//Edit2 - MS Publisher is actually better then Word due to its' being a page layout program. Much easier to position graphics, cells, etc.

Edited August 10, 2007 by Tywais

[Plus]

Yeah, you can design a page in Word and then export as HTML.

The problem is that the code will be full of crap. Most likely parts of it will be incomprehensible in Firefox or Opera.

Dreamweaver actually has a feature called "clean up Word HTML".

If you learn to write the code yourself, you'll soon start cleaning up after Dreamweaver, too.

HTML is like a language, it can be beautiful and very precise, WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) programs like Dreamweaver take over your "speaking" ability and you end up doing baby talk for the rest of your life. Or if you ever learn to code properly you'll cringe at the sight of these "baby talk" pages. Lots of Thai sites are so crappy because people who design them always rely on Dreamweaver.

Bangkok Post, the Nation - they are all done by Dreamweaver fed amateurs. Every second day Bangkok Post has an image that protrudes out of its space and its borders. Every archived article in the Nation has credits and contact details right in the middle of the article covering the text. These problems usually arise when they use "automatic" feature from the editor that works more or less like what they want to see but in a computer language you need to be precise, there's only ONE way to achieve something. All other variants will have unpredictable side effects. These guys are blissfully unaware.

>>>>>

Writing the code yourself is not particularly difficult. Editors like Notepad++ help you with every step. You type "f" and it will give you a list of all possible choices that begin with "f", just click the one you want and that's it.

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

Any beginner would need a tutorial regardless of the editor. Dreamweaver doesn't tell you where to start eiher.

Tutorials are great not only for learning but for quick reference, too. Very often you just copy a chunk of code, paste it into your page, and make a few changes here and there, it's so much easier than thinking up what to type yourself.

My personal favourites:

http://www.w3schools.com

and

http://www.tizag.com/htmlT

One more thing - webdesign is not about HTML, all the visual presentation is handled by CSS - style sheets.

W3schools have CSS tutorials as well.

Html only stores content of your pages, CSS displays it. Colors, font sizes, placement on the page - nowadays it's all done through CSS, and even dreamweaver has caught up and doesn't insert this information in html as it used to. It took them only five years to realise that all this time they've been teaching users to do it wrong way.

Writing CSS is very easy, the pattern is the same for all elements on the page, it's the "thinking" part that is difficult. How to put that paragraph exactly below the image? How to make background for this part of the page blue and for that part yellow? That's where Dreamweaver solutions tend to produce side efects.

I know it's tough reading, but if you learn to understand and use CSS "visual formatting model" before you learn to draw and color rectangles with Dreamweaver, you'll have a good chance of becoming a CSS guru yourself. Most people never have a chance to go back and re-learn theses basics and so continue making pages way above their level of comprehension.

I once saw a webmaster who ran a webserver himself. One day something went wrong and a few files became unaccessible and even undeletable. His solution was: "This computer has gone bad, let's move the server to another one. Do you have a recent copy of the site?"

[dogblower]

There's also a freeware program floating around called Namu6 which is very simple to operate, doesn't need any coding knowledge and has a basic template already set up.

Another useful thing you might try is to right-click on a simple web page and choose "view source". This will show you the html code used for the page and will sometimes give you some useful info on how things were done (note I did say simple website).

[malcolmswaine]

If you're interested in going down the MS .NET route, Visual Studio 2008 Beta is downloadable free from Microsoft, such is SQL Server Express 2005. Good tools if you're into functionality, but make sure you've got at least 2GB of RAM to play around with. Great web casts to learn from as well on the MS site. In my experience Dreamweaver still comes out on top though for graphic design and helping draggy-droppy type people - but falls short if you're into hacking lines of code.

Have fun and if you need any software PM me (free of course, but it's up to you to pay the license (ahem ))

[Mai Krap]

JOOMLA

JOOMLA DIRECT LINK

Joomla is a free open source CMS Content Management System.

What is Joomla! ?

Joomla! is an award-winning Content Management System (CMS) that will help you build websites and other powerful online applications. Best of all, Joomla! is an open source solution that is freely available to everybody.

Joomla! for End Users

The basic Joomla! package is designed to be easy to install, even for non-programmers. Most people have no trouble getting our software up and running, and there is plenty of support available for newbies. We have a growing, active community of more than 40,000 friendly users and developers on our forums eager to help.

Once Joomla! is installed and running, it is simple for even non-technical users to add or edit content, update images, and to manage the critical data that makes your company or organization go. Anybody with basic word processing skills can easily learn to manage a Joomla! site.

Via a simple, browser-based interface you will be able to easily add new press releases or news items, manage staff pages, job listings, product images, and create an unlimited amount of sections or content pages on your site. You can try our simple demo to get quick taste of what Joomla! is all about.

[Khun Bob]

Stay open source free and cheap :

try portableapps.com for

Kompozer

FileZilla

WinSCP

Firefox

& more - there is even a portable MySQL and CMS which can be used for development

Free hosting :

Freehostia.com

Cheap domain names :

1and1.com

netfirms.com

sometimes you get specials (GoDaddy seems to be king of those - but is not consistently cheap - I've moved most of my names from there) - also depends on what top level domain you want - there is quite a few to choose from now and it is growing all the time - soon .asia will be available !

And dont forget :

Google analytics

Google webmaster tools

And theres alot more too

Only the domain name will cost

Also if you have google adverts on your site and you get traffic, then you could actually start making some money out of it -

Could I suggest a site like this for cambodia - perhaps visacambodia.com or maybe cambovisa.com ?

[macb]

Wow thanks folks now I got a headache: (Joking)

Well loads of info here for me to peruse :

There was a post asking what level do I want to attain, well we would all like to make some money, mmmmmmmm I got a mate designs webpages and he is inundated with work I thought I might be a ble to be of assistance to him, by being creative then sending my work for him to peruse.

Codes look Upload well I remembered that already so that's a start :

I have made posters in the past, so i figure I want to get my head around websites properly

I have office 2007 installed

I have my own domain

Edited August 11, 2007 by macb

[Yorkie]

I have office 2007 installed

Mac,

Being our age I found it difficult to get round html coding at first so I initially used MS Publisher on my site. It's simple to use and integrates with MS Powerpoint for producing graphics. The downside is the resultant large size of the files which can make loading time slow.

Once I'd used Publisher, I then used an html editor to see how the code looks and hopefully how it works. I am now able to basically edit certain areas if I wish.

Beware with MS Publisher though: it is not 100% compatible with I.E. for some reason. Firefox and Netscape, no problem.

Check out http://www.freebeerforyorky.com

Y

[macb]

Yeah, you can design a page in Word and then export as HTML.

The problem is that the code will be full of crap. Most likely parts of it will be incomprehensible in Firefox or Opera.

Dreamweaver actually has a feature called "clean up Word HTML".

If you learn to write the code yourself, you'll soon start cleaning up after Dreamweaver, too.

HTML is like a language, it can be beautiful and very precise, WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) programs like Dreamweaver take over your "speaking" ability and you end up doing baby talk for the rest of your life. Or if you ever learn to code properly you'll cringe at the sight of these "baby talk" pages. Lots of Thai sites are so crappy because people who design them always rely on Dreamweaver.

Bangkok Post, the Nation - they are all done by Dreamweaver fed amateurs. Every second day Bangkok Post has an image that protrudes out of its space and its borders. Every archived article in the Nation has credits and contact details right in the middle of the article covering the text. These problems usually arise when they use "automatic" feature from the editor that works more or less like what they want to see but in a computer language you need to be precise, there's only ONE way to achieve something. All other variants will have unpredictable side effects. These guys are blissfully unaware.

>>>>>

Writing the code yourself is not particularly difficult. Editors like Notepad++ help you with every step. You type "f" and it will give you a list of all possible choices that begin with "f", just click the one you want and that's it.

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

Any beginner would need a tutorial regardless of the editor. Dreamweaver doesn't tell you where to start eiher.

Tutorials are great not only for learning but for quick reference, too. Very often you just copy a chunk of code, paste it into your page, and make a few changes here and there, it's so much easier than thinking up what to type yourself.

My personal favourites:

http://www.w3schools.com

and

http://www.tizag.com/htmlT

One more thing - webdesign is not about HTML, all the visual presentation is handled by CSS - style sheets.

W3schools have CSS tutorials as well.

Html only stores content of your pages, CSS displays it. Colors, font sizes, placement on the page - nowadays it's all done through CSS, and even dreamweaver has caught up and doesn't insert this information in html as it used to. It took them only five years to realise that all this time they've been teaching users to do it wrong way.

Writing CSS is very easy, the pattern is the same for all elements on the page, it's the "thinking" part that is difficult. How to put that paragraph exactly below the image? How to make background for this part of the page blue and for that part yellow? That's where Dreamweaver solutions tend to produce side efects.

I know it's tough reading, but if you learn to understand and use CSS "visual formatting model" before you learn to draw and color rectangles with Dreamweaver, you'll have a good chance of becoming a CSS guru yourself. Most people never have a chance to go back and re-learn theses basics and so continue making pages way above their level of comprehension.

I once saw a webmaster who ran a webserver himself. One day something went wrong and a few files became unaccessible and even undeletable. His solution was: "This computer has gone bad, let's move the server to another one. Do you have a recent copy of the site?"

I am looking at the 3schools site very interesting thanks

[cdnvic]

http://kompozer.sourceforge.net/

Very powerful, yet easy to use. No need to spend a lot of $$$.

[sukanyacondo]

I Must say I knew nothing about website building but my com came with frontpage and I found it quite easy. I did all my own website very quickly although I have no idea how good bad or anything it is in the eyes of a real website designer. It works for me and it was free. www.sukanyacondo.com

[Jimjim]

A lot of people seem to like Joomla, but I couldn't figure out how to work it (I didn't spend much time) and it doesn't seem to give much freedom, which I want (I'm not an expert at all, of course). I think a lot of the comments here are good, though.

JOOMLA

JOOMLA DIRECT LINK

Joomla is a free open source CMS Content Management System.

What is Joomla! ?

Joomla! is an award-winning Content Management System (CMS) that will help you build websites and other powerful online applications. Best of all, Joomla! is an open source solution that is freely available to everybody.

Joomla! for End Users

The basic Joomla! package is designed to be easy to install, even for non-programmers. Most people have no trouble getting our software up and running, and there is plenty of support available for newbies. We have a growing, active community of more than 40,000 friendly users and developers on our forums eager to help.

Once Joomla! is installed and running, it is simple for even non-technical users to add or edit content, update images, and to manage the critical data that makes your company or organization go. Anybody with basic word processing skills can easily learn to manage a Joomla! site.

Via a simple, browser-based interface you will be able to easily add new press releases or news items, manage staff pages, job listings, product images, and create an unlimited amount of sections or content pages on your site. You can try our simple demo to get quick taste of what Joomla! is all about.

[cdnvic]

Try Wordpress instead, it's much more user friendly and easy to get up and running fast.

http://www.wordpress.org/

[JimsKnight]

Go Dreamweaver

Its cheap (Just buy it at Pantip Plaza or any shady dealer) and cheerful, not too hard to use. Don't bother with the FTP bit though, there are much easier ones out there though

[cdnvic]

Go Dreamweaver

Its cheap (Just buy it at Pantip Plaza or any shady dealer) and cheerful, not too hard to use. Don't bother with the FTP bit though, there are much easier ones out there though

No need to promote thieving here.

[Richard-BKK]

If you are not a professional web-designer but still want to walk on the right side of the law, I say buy an older version of Adobe Dreamweaver I myself bought not to long ago an Dreamweaver 8 for little more then US$ 100.

The good part is that you can always upgrade to the latest version without paying the premium price. Also with a registered Dreamweaver product you can also download a huge amount of add-ins which make special things like pop-up pictures so much easier.

P.S. With the some simple tweaking it also possible to run Dreamweaver with Linux.

[pgs]

Dreamweaver is very expensive, so it Frontpage .

If you want to really learn how to design webpages you should probably start typing the code yourself rather than rely on these drag and drop editors and develop bad habits right from the start.

All you need is Notepad to type and something like CoreFTP to upload.

There are three basic parts to it - code, look, and upload. Code needs to be shown in different colors - a lot easier to work with, and code needs to be checked for mistakes - validated. That's all you need from the editor.

"Look" is the most difficult and most expensive part for editors but you'd be better off checking you design directly on the Internet with a browser. It's a pain in the ass when you discover that your perfect pages in Dreamweaver look totally screwed up on the Internet. What went wrong? Where was the mistake? This kind of forensics is often frustrating and time consuming.

The third part is upload - it's of course very easy if your editor can upload your pages in one click, but it's equally easy to do this one click in a separate FTP (file transfer protocol) program, a very small trade off.

So, while Dreamweaver and FrontPage offer complete solutions, it's not so difficult to break the job into smaller steps.

I was kidding when I said Notepad, btw.

Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_editor

You can surely find something there for free or open source that would suit you.

What's wrong with notepad? I started with it for webpages back in the mid 90's & still use it. I've look at Dreamweaver & the likes, but so far have stayed with notepad. Works fine.

[cdnvic]

I agree that it's good for everyone to learn how to do basic coding, but Notepad is just too much for the average person to have to learn initially and many people would just lose interest and give up if that were the only option. I started out with Notepad and Vi myself but now that I know the underlying code I find it much faster and easier to use Kompozer and just tweak it manually once in a while.

From a security standpoint it's also much better to use a CMS like Joomla, Wordpad, and others because they have a development community looking at security issues, not just one coder.

[El Taco Loco]

I use Dreamweaver and have done so for about 8 years. Let's say that you are just beginning using it and the manual is too obnoxious... Get Dreamweaver for dummies. You will start making killer pages in about 45 minutes.

[Veazer]

Try Wordpress instead, it's much more user friendly and easy to get up and running fast.

http://www.wordpress.org/

A potential problem with using wordpress is that search engines might reduce his search ranking unless the site is updated frequently, like a good blog should be. Search engines seem to be more 'tolerant' of other CMS systems like Joomla, Drupal, etc that are not focused on blogging. More on that here.

I do agree that a cms system would be a wiser choice, for many reasons.

Edit: changed google to search engines...

Edited August 13, 2007 by Veazer

[tjo o tjim]

If you don't go the Notepad.exe route, I would recommend using a Content Management System (Drupal, Nucleus, or plenty of others).

Another route is to use a free template and work from that. That's actually why I recommend just using a text editor-- you have a lot more flexibility.

The dreamweaver route is easier, but personally I enjoy not having a lot of extra cruft on my sites. No, I don't do this for a living...

[jukapot]

I use Dreamweaver and have done so for about 8 years. Let's say that you are just beginning using it and the manual is too obnoxious... Get Dreamweaver for dummies. You will start making killer pages in about 45 minutes.

Dreamweaver is expensive, as previously stated the old version Dreamweaver 8 can be had cheap. I just finished a short evening course at our Community college in Dreamweaver. I now qualify for the student discount and have purchased one of the big Adobe suites including Dreamweaver, Photoshop (extended version), Adobe Acrobat Professional version, Flash, Fireworks, Illustrator, and a few other programs I have no idea what they do. Paid about 25% of list price for the package,

There are many free programs available, but none do what I want Dreamweaver to do. I want a professional looking site with music, movies and slide shows.

I have plenty of free time and will have even more free time when I get to Nongkhai next spring. I'm 68 now and hope that all this studying will keep my mind fresh.

I recently prepare one site on my Mac, I was pleased with the results and the simplicity, but it just doesn't give me the freedom to show my photos as I want. Those interested in the Lao Rocket Festival in 1970 can see some photos at http://homepage.mac.com/tjnickle/PhotoAlbum4.html,

[cdnvic]

I recently prepare one site on my Mac, I was pleased with the results and the simplicity, but it just doesn't give me the freedom to show my photos as I want. Those interested in the Lao Rocket Festival in 1970 can see some photos at http://homepage.mac.com/tjnickle/PhotoAlbum4.html,

Great photos jukapot