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Web design help [Updated-New Q in last post]
Edgie
TampaRegistered User regular
TampaRegistered User regular
About a week ago, my brother asked me about starting a webpage, and what's required. I went over how hosting works, where he should go and all that stuff. And after I told him about how someone has to design said webpage, he asked if I was capable of such a task.
Am I? Thus I'm here at H&A. While I'm damn fine with computers and software in general, I haven't tried to create a page since geocities was the shit. And if I remember, that page was obviously garbage.
So to be specific, there's two different sites. The first one, that would need to be finished sooner, is a website for a salon. Basically something that would look nice for any customer that reads it - coupons, probably directions, images of the salon, information on pricing and all that good stuff. Maybe pages for each person who works there, with said experience and a short bio.
The next one is a tougher, and won't have to be ready for another 4 or so odd months. Unlike the salon page, this one is going to be more of a online news site for sports in his local area. He said he'd like to have a subscription based service, people who pay X a month can read the whole article while those who have not can only read a snippit of the article.
As for my experience, next to nil. What's the best way to go about this? Should I crack open a book on html for the newspaper site? Use some kind of software to design the salon site? In addition, these sites will probably require graphics designed, and despite owning the GIMP I don't think I have the artistic merits/skill to do them. Help me H&A!
Am I? Thus I'm here at H&A. While I'm damn fine with computers and software in general, I haven't tried to create a page since geocities was the shit. And if I remember, that page was obviously garbage.
So to be specific, there's two different sites. The first one, that would need to be finished sooner, is a website for a salon. Basically something that would look nice for any customer that reads it - coupons, probably directions, images of the salon, information on pricing and all that good stuff. Maybe pages for each person who works there, with said experience and a short bio.
The next one is a tougher, and won't have to be ready for another 4 or so odd months. Unlike the salon page, this one is going to be more of a online news site for sports in his local area. He said he'd like to have a subscription based service, people who pay X a month can read the whole article while those who have not can only read a snippit of the article.
As for my experience, next to nil. What's the best way to go about this? Should I crack open a book on html for the newspaper site? Use some kind of software to design the salon site? In addition, these sites will probably require graphics designed, and despite owning the GIMP I don't think I have the artistic merits/skill to do them. Help me H&A!
Edgie on
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Pick one that your heart fancies.. All you need to do then is edit and upload.
Sure, you can crack open a book and pick up html easily, as well as go to your favorite site and view the source, and copy it directly.
... but anything other then the very basic stuff will VERY quickly overwhelm you. The source of PA itself is overwhelming, since all of the content is generated by code on the fly.
And I haven't even touched on all the various CSS hacks/tricks and general interweb shennanigans needed to make IE & Firefox & Opera & Safari see your page as you intend.
If you need some sort of payment gateway / shopping cart, etc ... then hand off the project to another party... this isn't something that you want to do as your first webpage... and the errors & lack of security you introduce will not be fun for the webhost and/or the merchant.
Librarians harbor a terrible secret. Find it.
The news site would be a pain in your neck. There's security and management and design. You might be able to find some software out there that will take care of the management for you (google CMS - Content Management System), but the security / blocking out users is going to take a lot of hacking from what I've seen. Plus, if you want a unique design, you're going to have to dig into the CMS's templating system. This means a large project. You'd be best finding someone who has some experience in these areas to help you out.
It's easy to say "No problem! I can help you out! That doesn't sound too bad!" only to find yourself knee deep about 3 or 4 months from now, stressed out and wondering why you agreed to this.
Good luck though! 8)
I don't think you can make subscription-only articles though, at least without perhaps putting another copy of wordpress in another directory with username/password based access and alter the code for the lite version to not print the entire article.
You'd also need a secure method of taking payments, and your friend would have to sign a whole ton of paperwork to say he can take and keep personal details of subscribers etc. He lso needs some kind of markeeting strategy; why sould anyone pay for news they'll get in the local rag anyway? If your friend hasn't considered all of this already, his site is unlikely to succeed.
But yeah, between security, taking payments, and CMS I'm pretty aware that this is out of my league. But thanks to the templates I'm working on the salon site now, slowly but surely.
If he hasn't looked into that at all he probably should. If he has and still wants to go with subscription, then I guess that's what he's going to do.
Overall, creating a SQL driven database website with full advertising and a subscription mechanism is a job for the professionals, and will probably cost him 10K + depending on how complex he wants it to be.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
So that leads to something I'd imagine would be easier to accomplish. With 6months of reading and learning, would I be able to learn enough to do this project? And where should I start? Will just learning Content Management System be enough, or should I pick up books on html and SQL? Even if this will be a lot of work, I'd personally like to do it. As a 21 year old with no career, no college education and a lot of knowledge on computers, I think knowing and setting something like this up would be really helpful for me. Plus I'd be getting paid. Would be great experience.
Oh, and thanks to everyone who have already responded, you guys have been great help.
You should be able to rely pretty heavily on a content management system (CMS) for this (wordpress has been mentioned and is a good one, but there are others). You've got plenty of time to get this one setup if you've got 6 months. You shouldn't have a problem at all. You won't need SQL or any real programming to get this off the ground. But if you're going to want a unique look, you're going to need to look into creating your own templates. This shouldn't be too tough. The CMS will give you plugs for your html to pull relevant info out (story title, story content, etc etc). Find one you like, install it, you're good to go. If you want ads for money (yes, you do want ads for money), get setup with Google's adsense.
So you're looking at learning html, css, and possibly javascript (probably not a lot of javascript).
You're also looking at web design. I'd suggest looking around at some of your favorite sites. What do they do right? Take a look at some "competitors" pages. What do they do right? Don't steal it, but definitely take it in and see if you can use it (okay, and maybe steal some of it
Good luck! Let us know what you come up with in the future (this place is great for web design critiques as well, you'll get lots of it)!
I also think it's funny that people have trouble with rendering between IE and Firefox. I've been using the "strict" doctype, and virtually everything renders identically between them. The only quirk I've run into with IE is related to tables with a cell that spans multiple rows but not columns. I had to use a hack to work around that, but the hack renders on Firefox correctly, so not a big deal. And yes, this is IE 6 as well as 7. 6 has the additional stupidity of not handling PNGs with an alpha channel correctly, but I ended up not using PNGs anyway.
Anyway, I just started looking at CSS tutorials and viewing the source of websites I visit frequently to get a feeling for the syntax.
http://www.thelostworlds.net/
It could be well over a year before such a website could even return a profit, not to mention the 3-4 months it would take you to write it on your own without any prerequisite knowledge or experience.
Given the fact that it's a specific genre and a small market (his own city) he would do well to see if the local press already has some web prescence, and if not, see if he can pitch his concept to serve as a proxy for the local newspaper. That way at least someone has his back.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
I'll start looking into CMS. Thanks again for all the awesome advice.