Web site development

Cornucopia

If you want to start with the basics, this site is a great tutorial & reference... http://www.w3schools.com/

InsideInsurance

booler wrote: »

Several people here unhappy with

But you will see the other person has added their affiliate code so its not a recommendation because they are good but one because they will be paid

Mikebellows

I'm not - Been using them for years - Never had a problem with them.

Mikebellows

InsideInsurance wrote: »

But you will see the other person has added their affiliate code so its not a recommendation because they are good but one because they will be paid

Wrong - Not paid at all - Just get more webspace, as does the person that signs with one.com.

booler

Domino, the real issue here is whether or not this is business website. If it is then you would be well advised to get help with it. I do websites myself and when I started back in 2001 I quickly realised that it was not what I didn't know that was the problem. It was what I didn't know that I didn't know!

There is more to website development than getting a cheap website editor and slapping some information up to some hosting space. Business websites have to be well designed otherwise they can do your business untold harm. Think about the times that you have been surfing the web and clicked away from a business website because you got fed up waiting for the page to load. You will also have arrived at pages with bad navigation, coding errors and ugly designs that made you click your back button pretty darned quick.

Also, in 2013 the forecast is that access to the Internet via small screen mobile devices will exceed that from laptops and PCs. In the website design community the current big thing is "Responsive Design". This is where websites are designed to respond to the screen size of the device (the viewport) being used to access them.

Believe me, it is not as easy as it once was.

heart_free

I took a course (funded as I'm self-employed) in developing using Joomla. Once you have the basics under your belt, its easy to use, and there are so many templates and bolt ons thats its extremely versatile. My sister taught herself to use it, but she is a developer. I'm just a tech savvy SEO consultant, but we both found it great to use.

gwyne

Totally agree with the_r_sole there are a hundred different ways to use Wordpress and a lot to learn! From customising themes to building your own themes from scratch to developing plugins. I'd always recommend Wordpress due to its flexibility. The big thing that is overlooked in developing websites is how useful a "friendly" CMS is for other users to add content in and help you grow a website, instead of diving into code to change everything. It's a great place to start in learning how to develop sites.

Joomla and Drupal are also decent alternatives, but Wordpress holds a special place in my heart

so53

If you want to learn website coding from the ground up I would stay clear of Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal etc.

I have used Dreamweaver from day 1, it comes with some basic templates as well which you can mess around with. It's pretty much an industry standard for website design. You can do code editing and visual editing side by side (other editors offer this as well) so you can see your code evolve as you add/edit code. Adobe now offer a monthly subscription for around £30-40 a month which gives you access to their entire suite of website design and graphics products so you don't have to spend out ££££s of software. On the cheap, you could always use Notepad (Windows), or TextEdit (Mac) and then load your pages in a web browser to see how things are shaping up.

Look at diving straight into responsive design and css grid frameworks as that will bring you up to speed with current trends in design particular with regards to having your designs work well on mobile devices as well as desktop

Lynda.com is an excellent training site, it's a paid service and there are so many online tutorials/courses available presented in a consistent and easy to follow format.


Good luck!

CraiggJ

It really depends on what you're wanting to get out of it and what kind of things that you want on your website.

I'd recommend looking at w3schools.com

Another great website is CodeAcademy, here's some links for the fundamentals of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) which you'll need to know or at least be aware of when starting out with your first website.

codecademy.com/courses/html-one-o-one

Another is a mix of HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), CSS can do a lot of the jobs that HTML can do in a cleaner, quicker and easier way.

codecademy.com/tracks/htmlcss

When I first started building websites when I were younger - I used Microsoft Frontpage (wouldn't recommend it now) I learned the basics, before moving on to Dreamweaver. I would use the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors - very similar to these posting boxes on these forums.

Once you've got some knowledge of HTML and CSS, I would suggest moving on to the code view, rather than visual creation. Whilst it's nice to look at what you're making as you're making it, it's not very accurate. Especially with software such as DW.

If you're in the code view, you right the code and you make it do what you want it to do. Rather than you trying to align a picture and DW moving it somewhere else. You have more control. You can then simply preview it in your browser to see how it looks.

Sorry about the rubbish hyperlinks - newbies can't post URLS

InsideInsurance

Mikebellows wrote: »

Wrong - Not paid at all - Just get more webspace, as does the person that signs with one.com.

So you are paid, just paid in space rather than cash