Makin' A Website There, Boss!

An-D

Hello! Its the summer now, and for some reason I'm more ambitious and motivated for college/college stuff than I ever am during the actual semesters. So, I want to do something that'll look snazzy for when school starts...since I have time to tinker with it and all.

I'm the president of the school's fencing club and I'd like to upgrade our free freewebs account into something that isn't so....bad. The free freewebs is alright (great for me, because I don't know how to build websites really. The wizard really helps), but it seems the photo gallery is always messing up and little applications seem to crash...the whole site is a big mess.

I have the money now, and I'm willing to pay to kick it up a notch on the club website (preferably no more than 10-15 dollars a month).

I have very little experience working with html or any web-code, so wizards/site-builders are always an awesome help. With a new website making-host thing, the main tools I would like to have is the ability to use a photo-gallery, have a decent forum (the one we use now is a ghost town because spambots keep getting in) and I'd like the forum to be like PA's forum (the layout, rather not deal with a blog-type of thing). Email would be nice, but isn't entirely necessary and I'd like the ability to make at least 10 different pages for the site (Home, Gallery, About Us, Calendar, Armory etc etc).

So in summary, I want to make a spiffy website for my fencing club. Or...if staying with freewebs and just upgrading my account is my best option, that would be good to know.

Thanks!! :^:

Reznik

If you can get a host that supports php/MySQL, it is very easy to get a phpBB3 forum running.

I don't know a lot of hosts, but you might want to check out www.polarhome.com

It's cheap (a one-time fee of '10 local currency units'), supports FTP, MySQL, and provides you with a [username]@[server].polarhome.com e-mail address. I don't think it has a website builder, though. You'd have to do everything from scratch.

An-D

I'll keep polarhome in mind, but a site-builder is pretty essential right now. I...*might* be able to make up something in microsoft word, but I'm not sure if I should be putting my skills the test for something that a lot of people may end up using.

theSquid

Get your hands on Dreamweaver if at all possible, you don't want to be using the Microsoft alternatives. After that making webpages should be a pretty laid back deal.

Don't know about the rest though... the forum in particular would be some complicated business. I set up phpBB3 on my comp, IIRC you're just extracting a bunch of files to a directory and running a browser-based setup.

flatlinegraphics

find something that supports wordpress, set up, edit, done.
http://wordpress.org/

installing myphpbb is, as theSquid says, pretty much uploading all the files to your server and going through some webbased instructions/install.

htmlkit+ and/or nvu are opensource/free alternatives to dreamweaver. i would really really really recommend against using word to output html. it is actually EASIER to learn html and do it right than to try and hammer word into outputing somehting that is not html vomit.

i recommend asmallorange hosting. http://asmallorange.com/
the small hosting package is $25 a year, which is probably more space and bandwidth than you will use.

YourSexyMama

I would say host the site yourself... but that takes some Linux knowledge.

As for the site design... don't you DARE use a MS product to create a page. MS will uses 100+ lines to write something that only requires 10... (Dreamweaver is better, but again it adds more lines than necessary, just code by hand it's faster and better looking)

HTML is very easy - http://www.w3schools.com/ - This is one of the best sites to learn from.

tmoli42

I haven't tried it, but the Google Pages page looks pretty spiffy. Plus you could integrate it in will all the other google apps stuff (calendar, mailing lists, etc).

Otherwise I, too, would recommend a WordPress/phpBB/etc install on a linux hosted-webserver. (I use dreamhost personally, but it might be a little more than you're willing to pay/learn.)

Afty

theSquid wrote: »

Get your hands on Dreamweaver if at all possible, you don't want to be using the Microsoft alternatives. After that making webpages should be a pretty laid back deal.

Hah !

(I'm a web developer ;P )

To expand i recommend using dreamweaver - the code view can really speed up development times if you know what you are doing. The WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor can die in a fire though.

Basic HTML and CSS are very easy to pick up. It's the actual design of a site that i find tricky!

To echo what others have said Wordpress is very easy to install and has tonnes of modules to do other stuff.

matthias00

Using Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG interface was really, really easy for me to do when I used the software. I'm by no means a web dev or anything, I barely know any HTML at all, so yeah the WYSIWYG interface is probably terrible for pros (I'm guessing the code it generates is horribly inefficient or somesuch), but if you're just making your own amateur website, the results are pretty nice.

Monolithic_Dome

Don't buy dreamweaver.

Try google pages. If you need features that are more advanced than that you want Wordpress or Movable Type. Both have pretty decent built-in themes, and both make it ridiculously easy to modify those themes.

matthias00

I guess it all just depends on how big you want this website to be. I'm pretty sure Dreamweaver still has a trial period where you can use it for like 15 days or something, which is what I did when I used it.

On the other hand, googlepages is great for a website if you don't mind a pretty standard layout with not too many bells and/or whistles.

Jasconius

Can we stop with the unenlightened bashing of Microsoft products?

There hasn't been a release of FrontPage in over five years, and the Visual Studio derivatives that they pitch to web developers are actually quite decent HTML editors.

The WYSYWIG in them is not nearly as powerful as Dreamweaver, however.

flatlinegraphics

Jasconius wrote: »

Can we stop with the unenlightened bashing of Microsoft products?

There hasn't been a release of FrontPage in over five years, and the Visual Studio derivatives that they pitch to web developers are actually quite decent HTML editors.

The WYSYWIG in them is not nearly as powerful as Dreamweaver, however.

yes, but opening up a word document and going "save as - > html" is every bit as bad.
i agree that the visual studio stuff is way better. and visual studio express is free (ish)!
http://www.microsoft.com/express/vwd/