How do I produce a professional website ?

frugalandsensible

How can I produce a professional website ? Is it possible for me to do it myself, having limited computer skills, or is best left to a professional.

If I'm able to produce one myself, which is the BEST website to use ?

If it's a professional, then can someone recommend a site or individual.

Can someone explain this in detail..

Happy New Year :beer:

[Deleted User]

Doing it yourself will not produce 'professional' results. The closest you'll get is if you use a pre-made template. Some of these can be found here:

http://www.free-css-templates.com/
http://www.opensourcetemplates.org/

If it's for a business, i'd recommend hunting down some local web designers.. maybe start with a college or university.

They key behind a nice looking website is design.. remember that. It's like saying "how do i produce a professional advert for a magazine.". If you're unable to do that, how do you think you'll manage making a decent website?

Dreamweaver is a very commonly used web-design tool

PROLIANT

If you have no programming skills I would say get somebody to build it for you, if you want to play around with site building, download Microsoft C# ASP.NET express Web programming suite free and have a go, learn the .NET runtime environment first then understand C# programming language, there are millions of tutorials on the net and support forums out there that you can tap in to, C# is a strongly typed language but is powerful in use and once you have a handle on the basics then you are in business, might even lead to a promising career in Software development.

PROLIANT

Oh and a rule of thumb to remember in programming weather it be a Win Forms application or a ASP web site...."don't start mixing the paint before you have even begun laying the bricks", ergo build and test the code behind the application first before worrying about the aesthetic aspects of the software. :rolleyes:

samhale

What Proliant has just said is reffering to software programming- when it seems you are on about website design?

You can use templates that look snazzy, but often have a template-feel to it, making it not professional

I learnt how to make my websites just trial and error, and with the PHP coding (which you probably wouldn't need, you would if you wanted user's and dynamic content) I tried learning out of books, but just used online tutorials.

You can get a very good website created, virtually any student taking ICT can knock you one up cheaply.

Dime_Bar

I would try and stay away from templates as they generally look like they are templates. A good design does not have be complicated and is achievable to someone who is willing to put a fair few hours of work.

What kind of site are you looking at creating? if it for e-commerce or just as a on-line brochure for your company?

scheming_gypsy

you can always do what i do and cheat.

if you right click on a webpage and 'view source' it gives you all the code used for that page. So find a site you like the general layout of, view the source for each page and save it. Then edit each page for your own style, making sure you change all the important parts (meta tags etc).
The code will be html / css or whatever so you're not stealing anything.

I'm doing a page for a friend and doing it this way. I do have a bit of web design knowledge but not enough to start writing pages in pure CSS. Pretty much enough to know what needs changing and changing the links for pictures etc etc.

M4RKM

get someone else to do it in my opinion... i gotta say that or i'll be putting myself out of a job!!!

seriously though, what you'll get from someone who does this kinda thing day in day out, in a lot less time than what it'll take you, for a few hundred quid (depending on what you're wanting obviously), will be a lot lot better..

M