The Opinion Review

Web Page Design

In order to do your own website you would either need to learn html or use some kind of “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) editor like Dreamweaver or FrontPage
You can learn html at many different sites like: This One
It is actually good to use both HTML and a WYSIWYG editor.

There is a free wysiwyg editor that can be downloaded at: http://nvu.com/ It is a bit clunky however. But I have used it successfully

There is also lots of services that offer online “site builder tools” Like http://1and1.com And Homestead … I have found these things are a bit limited and clunky too. I have seen some nice sites that were built with those tools too. So that is an option.

Free Design/Hosting

It cost’s money to be on the web. You have to pay rent. Unless you want to use a free hosting service. But they are usually ad supported. The most popular free host is geocities but that is very limited. I have went through lots of hosts in the past and am currently putting together a host recommendation page and will post it if I ever have time. The new thing these days are blogs…There are many free blogging services out there.. Blogger is the first an most popular.

Quick Full Interactive Site

If you want a quick full interactive site you can install a “Content Management System” (CMS) on a server and start managing a site right away. There are several free ones out there to use. Some are better than others. You can “test drive” many of these at: http://opensourcecms.com/ You must have a server that supports PHP/MSQL in order to use one of these CMS

Images Tools

Also a site will need images… Images need to be very small on a website or they take forever for dialup folks to see… Any pictures need to be “optimized” for the web. There is a free program that can do this pretty well at: http://irfanview.com/ All Images on the web must be either GIF or JPEG format..

FTP

I typically design a site on my computer here at home (locally) and then upload them to a server after they are done. In order to do this you will need a FTP client like Smart FTP. That program will connect to your host so you can upload your pages.

Comments

Keep in mind also that any and all of the above stuff WILL require going around a learning curve so be prepared to spend some considerable time at a computer – daily. And remember the best place to find info on how to do something with computers is the internet. I have leaned lots of things by simply surfing or posting in “web design forums”. Just do a search for one with your favorite search engine.

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