Building a website, can't code

Improvolone

I want to build a website. Like everything else in life, this comes with good news and bad news. Lets look at those things.

The good news: The domain I want is available
The bad news: I can't code and would rather avoid learning how. I can also be fairly particular. I don't want to use templates and I don't want a blog.

This website would be used for personal/professional use (ie selling myself as totally awesome). I will not be selling anything through the website. Is there some sort of drag and drop software I can use?

Jimmy King

here's a list of apps that do what you want. I have no idea how good any of them are. I only have experience with Dreamweaver and Frontpage. At the time that I used them, neither were that great. At the time, these sorts of tools could get you something that was usable, but generally fairly amateur looking with god awful mark up on the back end.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_HTML_editors

That said, doing html and css is not "coding" as in actual programming with logic and stuff. It's just very basic tags around your text to tell it what it needs to look like.

Improvolone

I remember building with Geocities back in the day, that was fucking great.

YodaTuna

If you have the money, Dreamweaver is sweet.

bsjezz

i've been using composer; it's no dreamweaver but it does the job pretty well. in the past i've actually used a dreamweaver trial to build the foundation of a website, then when it expires switch to something like composer for maintenance, changes etc.

i'd still recommend reading up for a few hours on html and css, just so you have a vague idea of how things work. you may never be able to code a good page from scratch, i'm sure as hell not, but it's extremely useful to be able to look at the code and have a general understanding of what things are doing, in case you need to tweak some values or whatever at the base level. it's not that hard, it's a lot like forum tags. it's really just a matter of reading through a glossary sort of thing to see what different tags do

Movitz

YodaTuna wrote: »

If you have the money, Dreamweaver is sweet.

I started working on our departments homepage with pretty rudimentary HTML skills and Dreamweaver. It took a couple of days to get the hang of it but was really worth it.

I also bought a nice book called "Dreamweaver: The missing manual" by Somedude for pretty cheap. I would recommend that book as well, it's basically a no nonsense book on the basics. Like a manual but someone actually bothered writing it so a n00b can understand. If you're interested I can give you the full name of the book, I can't remember it right now.

Improvolone

Sure!
I can read HTML and figure it out half way decently and I've also been using Linux for over a year, so my experience in manipulating code type settings is decent. I'm sure I can learn some basic HTML, but I didn't want to.

Nightslyr

In all honesty, HTML takes about an hour to learn, and there's nothing in it I'd consider to be advanced or complicated. If you can write forum posts using BBCode, you can write HTML. Since you're making a site, there's no reason not to learn it, at least for debugging purposes.*

Complexity comes with CSS, but even then it's not that bad. And it's also good to learn for debugging purposes.*

*Be sure to test, or have others test, your site in a variety of browsers - FireFox, Opera, Chrome, IE6-8, Safari. You'll probably find that it looks right in everything except IE, especially the older versions. Unfortunately, you can't just leave it be, as IE still has about 60% market share. And fixing whatever flaws may show up will require editing code, so be prepared for that.

Liquid Hellz

I didn't see Microsoft Publisher on that list but that is what I use. I used it to make this and this which are both pretty basic. I also have no coding experience. If your looking for something of similar quality you could just use publisher. If you need something more high end/better quality I have heard dreamweaver is good but it may require some training.. or a lot of messing around with it at the least.

Rye

Nightslyr wrote: »

Unfortunately, you can't just leave it be, as IE still has about 60% market share.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp says you;re wrong. IE 8 has fixed a lot of problems, so really you're looking at <20% problem browsers.

OP could totally get into some sort of drag drop environment and make a decent site.

Weretaco

A suggestion for a quick site setup

www.squarespace.com

$8/month for their basic package and they have drag n drop tools for modifying their nice looking templates. 2 week free trial (no cc needed) too.

Nightslyr

Rye wrote: »

Nightslyr wrote: »

Unfortunately, you can't just leave it be, as IE still has about 60% market share.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp says you;re wrong. IE 8 has fixed a lot of problems, so really you're looking at <20% problem browsers.

OP could totally get into some sort of drag drop environment and make a decent site.

And ars technica (among others) says I'm right: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/05/chrome-continues-surge-as-ie-drops-below-60-market-share.ars

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Seriously, w3schools isn't a very good source for anything but quick, dirty syntax. I recommend that people not go to it. There are better, more in-depth options elsewhere on the net.

Finally, since the OP only gave a vague description of what their site will be for, in my mind it's best that they attempt to make it work in all modern browsers, which, unfortunately means IE6 as well.

Rye

Cart before Horse

The guy needs to make something first way before considering cross browser compatibility. Also, further down the page shows april 2010 stats from Ars:

JacksWastedLife

Browser usage stats for geeky sites are hardly a good metric for browser usage.

That said, if you don't want to pay $texas or $pirate for Dreamweaver there are a few webapp options for building and hosting sites.

http://www.squarespace.com/

http://www.drupalgardens.com/

I'm a little biased in favor of Drupal Gardens, but being on the dev team tends to have that affect. Also, it has a free pricing option.

Improvolone

Nightslyr wrote: »

Rye wrote: »

Nightslyr wrote: »

Unfortunately, you can't just leave it be, as IE still has about 60% market share.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp says you;re wrong. IE 8 has fixed a lot of problems, so really you're looking at <20% problem browsers.

OP could totally get into some sort of drag drop environment and make a decent site.

And ars technica (among others) says I'm right: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/05/chrome-continues-surge-as-ie-drops-below-60-market-share.ars

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Seriously, w3schools isn't a very good source for anything but quick, dirty syntax. I recommend that people not go to it. There are better, more in-depth options elsewhere on the net.

Finally, since the OP only gave a vague description of what their site will be for, in my mind it's best that they attempt to make it work in all modern browsers, which, unfortunately means IE6 as well.

I don't know why i didn't go into more detail about the site. Weird... anyway;
I'm an actor/entertainer/creative type. The website would be self promotion and an archive of the work that I've done.

DirtyDirtyVagrant

Yeah I recommend hand coding. Evidently with Dreamweaver and similar programs you get a lot of extra code in your source that can cause bugs and so forth. HTML is easy to use and incredibly easy to find reference for. I use notepad ++ and get help with code from w3schools.

Improvolone

You guys seem so confident that I can pick it up that you've made it sound like a good idea. Thanks everyone!

Is getting a book even worth it?

Jimmy King

Improvolone wrote: »

You guys seem so confident that I can pick it up that you've made it sound like a good idea. Thanks everyone!

Is getting a book even worth it?

Good choice, you can definitely do it, and it's definitely in your best interest in the long run. I wouldn't bother with a book to stat off unless you just really prefer having a physical book (I do at times and have bought many references/tutorial books for stuff I could learn online). There probably are some books worth investing some money in if you decide you like doing this stuff, though.

Brodo Faggins

If you have a Mac, iWeb is amazingly simple and it looks pretty good.

MushroomStick

I always liked htmlkit.

Mcflie

Hey guys,

First post here. To the OP, I recommend you learn HTML and CSS. You can get by with doing things by templates but in order to maintain the site to a high end finish and maintain a professional look then you'll need to be able to fix/amend/demolish things as you see fit. If you're building from a template it's not going to be easy.

Start small. Build one page and go from there. Picking up HTML is easy but don't try and build a site in a day. Put some thought into where you want the navigation to be and whether it needs to expand etc... I've been doing this professionally for over a decade and there are still things to learn. So as I said before, start small and work your way up. It might take longer than you'd like it to but overall it's a better to have a base knowledge to work from.

Feel free to ask any questions, I use Dreamweaver by the way.

Cheers,

Craig

MagicPrime

Just use Joomla. It is a free/open source CMS that has tons of support and templates out on the web.

Just search "Free Joomla Templates"

DeathPrawn

Using a template system is a great idea - it'll let you work on your basic HTML skills if you want, but you don't have to worry about the overall site framework or the bulk of the design. That being said, you might want to go for a more limited CMS like WordPress over something like Joomla. It may mainly be a blogging tool, but it has support for setting up standard pages, has tons and tons of plugins and themes available, and is a heck of a lot easier to use than a behemoth like Joomla or Drupal. Joomla can be a pain in the ass to set up, and for a basic portfolio site it's overkill.

MagicPrime

Wordpress is good too.