Making a website (HTML mostly)

Burning Organ

Okay, so one day I was in school, right? Right. The teacher had us do this one thing, which we did, and then he directed us to a document on websites and said "Get started.". So we made the tutorial website. Anyway, I get sick, so I miss out a lot on this website thing, so I got some catching up to do.
Basically, we can use any language we want, and the website can be about anything. I'm planing on keeping mine though... It's gonna be a video game review website. So I need a good solution for a easy way to add reviews for the website, in three different categories (PC, Wii and DS).
What would the recommended solution be? As I said, any language, any program (though free or relatively good trial software is preferred.)

Also, if you know any awesome web design resources, lemme know.

AngryHenrik

The easiest way would probably be a php content management script, depending on what resources you have. There's a fair few out there, so it'll probably best to research some and see which one meets your needs.

As for resources, a few I've found useful;

http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/ : Good tips on how to design a site that works for the user

http://realworldstyle.com/ : A few basic CSS layouts that don't rely on tables.

http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html ; Good for choosing a colour scheme that works well.

Burning Organ

Thanks, I'll have to look into php more

BoomShake

You could code a fairly simple system from scratch. while more time consuming initially, it's a hell of a lot easier to change your own code later down the line to meet new needs than it is to change some of the prebuilt CMS's, especially for less common purposes.

Basically what you'd do is have a database, probably mySQL. That's where all of the reviews, comments, news posts, member info, etc. would be stored in various tables. You then use PHP to interact with the table. For members that would mean getting the desired information from the database and displaying it, writing comments, etc. On the admin end it'd be for adding/editing/deleting reviews, comments, etc. (basically everything you'd want to do as an admin).

It should really take you only a few days if you code a few hours each day without too many distractions, and I believe it's a worthy investment in time. If nothing else, at least it'll solidify your knowledge of how such systems work if you eventually decide to go with a prebuilt system.

Burning Organ

Right... My website is the work of 2 hours unreal tournament LAN in school and 10 minutes of copy paste, so I don't know much....
You can use mySQL, PHP and HTML on the same website right?

Also, any programs I should check out?

Legoman05

Coding from scratch is a bit much, especially if you've no experience with any of that stuff.

mySQL is a database program that holds databases. You make 'calls' to that database from PHP, which is a markup language like HTML.

HTML is static. You enter in paragraph and text, and it will return a paragraph and text when the page is accessed. PHP acts, basically, like a pointer to do any number of things, including go to the database and grab information. So, while you might keep a paragraph of text on the page statically, you can instead make a PHP element that will pull the latest paragraph from the database, keeping your page up to date.

blincoln

If you've only just made a tutorial website, I think coding in PHP is a little beyond what you should be getting into. For one thing, you need to become more familiar with HTML so you can have the PHP generate valid HTML. For another, if you've never done any programming before, you need to get a solid handle on that before writing PHP that accesses MySQL or your code is going to be full of SQL injection vulnerabilities and someone will wipe out all of your content or deface your website in some other way.

Burning Organ

We aren't required to actually put the website online yet though.

EDIT: Does someone know how to not make a background repeat itself in HTML? I'm trying something out here, and I have this so far.

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>PC Reviews - MoH:A</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY BACKGROUND="MoHabk.jpg" bgproperties="fixed" > <BODY BGCOLOR="#969696"
TEXT="#000000" LINK="#8080FF" VLINK="#FF0000" ALINK="#FFFF80">
<HR WIDTH="80%">

Shouldn't that work, or am I missing something, because that image repeats itself.

wasted pixels

From memory, might not work:

<html>
<head>
<title>PC Reviews - MoH:A</title>
<style type="text/css">

body
    {
        background-image: url(MoHabk.jpg);
        background-attachment: fixed;
        background-color: #969696;
        color: #000000;
     }

a:link
    {
        color: #8080FF;
    }

a:visited
    {
        color: #ff0000;
    }

a:active
    {
        color: #ffff80;
    }

a:hover
    {
        color: #ffff80;
    }

</style>
</head>

<body>
[your content]
</body>
</html>

There are tidier ways of doing it, but I didn't use any shortcuts so that you could hopefully get a feel for what I did there. We're creating a style sheet with the style tag, specifying "Hey, we're going to assign these attributes to the <body> tag" with the word "body", then listing the things we want to do with CSS attributes in the braces. Give it a try.

Burning Organ

That did it, thanks