Website Building - advice needed!

starlite_2

Hi , my parents have purchased a domain name via fasthosts for our baby and I am clueless as to where to start.

I will mainly be using it as an online photo gallery, but also want to include 'journal' style entries, and a guestbook.

Fasthosts offer a free 'webbuilder', but it is limited to only 3 pages.

I am wondering if there is any free web building software around, and which one is best. Ideally I don't wnt to have to pay anything as money is tight at the moment.

Alterntively, is it worth learning html, flash etc from scratch? it can't be too hard as so many people can do it nowadays, i have time as i am on maternity lave, and feel it would be a valuable thing to know.

Am I just being naive with this though? how long would it take me to learn a good standard of skills?

Any advice or tips much appreciated

Sooler

You could use flickr http://flickr.com/ to host your pictures, this also allows notes to be added. It may suit what you want to do and get you something up online easily and quickly.

To learn enough HTML to create a simple static frontpage on fasthost, to display some pictures, text and add links to the flickr pages would take a week or two.

So you could create a homepage with the domain name on fasthost and on it include a link to your flickr pages.

This would be enough to get you going.

To learn the intricasies of HTML several months, to master, a year or more - depends how much time you want to spend on it.

You'd be better getting some level of compitance with HTML before you look at other webby things like Flash

wolfman

If you want to auto generate photo albums, look at Picasa (by Google). It's used for organising your photo albums, and can auto generate html pages and thumbnail images of all your pics.

Learning web languages yourself is obviously a much bigger task. Start at https://www.w3schools.com. Learn XHTML/HTML and CSS for starters.

I find https://www.csszengarden.com very good for ideas and templates, although have found since becoming more advanced some of the examples are a little flawed. Still a good place to look as they provide source code that is easy to understand.

starlite_2

thanks, the picasa idea is interesting. I have been using it for basic editing and didn't realise it has that function.

i have just come across this..

http://easyinternetsolutions.co.uk/downloads/websitebuilder/index.php

it is free software, do you think i can use it alongside the picasa function?
Sorry but i really am clueless.

starlite_2

oh- just looking at their forum and it seems you have to have a hosting account with them to use it. they don't make that particularly clear, good job i didn't waste time making pages to find that out!

-=Mr-J=-

To create a simple 'static' website i simple stuff and will require only HTML/CSS knowledge, easily done via the likes of w3schools and webmonkey.

However! If you are going to put pictures of your baby, etc. on - I would strongly suggest some form of access control, such that only people you wish to access (& download) the pictures can do so. For this your going to need some form of server-side scripting - unless the host provides some built in method for you to use.

Also, for your guestbook requirement (& journal entries - unless these are only by you) you will also need some server-side scripting.

starlite_2

thanks for all your help..after reading a few forums and tutorials and realising html speak is like trying to read dutch road signs i just bought the webbuilder subscription.
I plan to get round it's limitations by asking more savvy friends to write and enter html script within the easy peasy site i've built.
i'v already got it looking pretty damn great and have over 100 hits (though half of them were probably my mum...lol)
might strt trying to learn it..but at least this way I won't be under any pressure.