Painless Website Building For Beginners.

[worldwidese]

After having read the advice given by our techno savvy guys, I have a suggestion for those who would like to get themselves seen on the web but who find the lengthy process daunting. Scot says it took him 3-4 months to do his first website. So why not first make a web page for free without having to wrestle with html.?

Go to Geocities in Yahoo! or go to Netscape and get some practice first. You can get an "automated" template and make a "Get your feet wet" basic webpage in about 15 minutes or less. http://geocities.yahoo.com/ps/learn2...rks4_Free.html This will get you started.

If you are working in Yahoo! go next to PageBuilder. You can build yourself a whole site, with choices of background, fonts and add ons. You can upload your photos too. Just click on Help, or go to FAQ's if you don't understand how to do something.

Pagebuilder allows you to preview your page at any moment to see how it will look when published. Remember to save your page after each change you make. When you are satisfied with your efforts be sure to get your site listed in the Members Directory, so others can view your creation.

If you really think then that you are ready for html. you bring up your page on screen, click on View on the toolbar, and then click Source. You will then see your page displayed as html.. and you can see how the page was made. This will give you a model to work from.

Although you won't acheive a really flashy site by this method, you will get the hang quickly of the process and you'll get yourself on the web while you're working on your html. masterpiece.

OK, techno savvy guys, have at me!

[scot]

This is mostly right. You will come up with a site that looks like most Geocities sites. I haven't looked at the source for one of these sites lately, but most auto site programs make really confusing code. So, you'll have a site that looks bad, but it will be hard to learn from.

When I was getting started (1997), everthing was hand made and easy to sort through. I learned by looking at people's source and figuring out what went to what. Now, that's super difficult. HTML has become a bigger language, people use Javascript, CSS, and XHTML which makes things really confusing.

If you want to learn now, I would recommend looking up some tutorials on the web on getting started in html (webmonkey is great). Then, go buy a reference book -- a thin book with just the necessary information about each tag and what it does. You're still spending money, you're still using your time, but if you go for a clean look, your site can be pretty pro in a couple of months. Taxi Trix didn't become a senior member in a day.

The most important things in your design are:

• figure out what your product is (if you're a solo performer, the product is your personality)
• figure out your audience
• put together required information (contact info, headshot... whatever is required for this task)
• decide how you'll sell this product to this audience
• draw, w/ pencil and paper, 4cm x 6cm pictures of your plan
• draw a bigger size of the plan that works the best
• Then start with the HTML and Image program

Remember, your original images that fit together and make the page complete are much more important than fancy HTML.

Simple HTML coupled with really nice photoshop work will create exquisite results.

Scot

[Doctor Eric]

I learned through a combination of stealing pieces of code off of other sites and Dreamweaver, Scot's right, stealing code isn't very helpful anymore, unless you have a working knowledge of it already. If you can get your hands on Dreamweaver though, it can help. Dreamweaver has an onboard HTML dictionary, and you can view your pages in split-screen, raw code on top, and a preview on the bottom, that way, you can code by hand and see your results in realtime, dreamweaver will also let you build things visually, but all of those things make messy code. This method can be a tad more expensive, I guess.

[worldwidese]

Good enough to get the message across.

This was done on Yahoo Pagebuilder and it gets gigs, which is I suppose, the point.

It's not Pagebuilder's fault if most of the pics are fuzzy, that's because they are not studio shots.

http://www.geocities.com/puppetartsus/Busking.html

If you look at the Source, it's html.