Web site design softwares

[solidwoods]

Sorry to ask this again.  I just saw this topic go by a few weeks ago but searching is not making anything.

World.  Wide.  Wait.

Any suggestions for creating my own small business web site.
I have some past experience with this, and I am adequately computer literate (my sentance structure is pretty rough though).

MS Frontpage..any good?

JIM

[Minnesota_boy]

Personal opinion, Frontpage adds a lot of garbage to the code.  It can make a good looking page and is easy to learn.  There are others that are just as good or better and some are much less expensive, unless you got Frontpage with a bundle.

[Norm]

Jim, I use NetObjects Fusion. Not sure if this is more than you need but go to their website and see if it's something that may work for you.

http://www.netobjects.com/

[Jeff]

I guess I would like to add here that any of those programs can make a decent looking website.... Sort of.  It may look good on your computer but does it look good on your customers computer? How do you know?  How many websites have you went to where you had to slide back and forth to read something or stuff seemed jumbled up. I bet that website looked great on the builders computer.

Do you know how to deal with varying monitor sizes and resolutions? Do you know what a core font is? Do you know how to deal with all the different browsers and their different configurations?  Do you want to find out that a customer went to your business site and the font you chose was not on their computer so instead their system defaulted to the next best choice which was a wingding hieroglyphic?

Really, a business site should be done with the help of somebody that knows how to answer at least some of those questions. You don't want your potential customers first impression of you to be a half ass website.

[MrMoo]

Take Jeff's advice he is right on the money with his comments.
As someone who builds software for a living I can tell you that impressions of how a website looks & behaves is important. If you are serious about your business & the website invest a few bucks & have it done by someone who does websites...like Jeff for instance!

[solidwoods]

What's a few bucks?
What would $500 buy.
JIM

[Jeff]

A lot. I'll send you a private message

[rebocardo]

Sometimes the easiest thing to do (from someone that has used everything from notepad to Pagemaker for Web sites) is to use word processing software that exports HTML or a web hosting service that has the "fill in the blanks" web pages.

The latter is the best for beginners. I have been using www.godaddy.com to register my URLs and their prices for hosting seem reasonable (I run my own server).

You can get code checkers from www.w3.org to check pages for correct coding, though I guarantee FrontPage will make it sick. I took a simple page I did in notepad, put it in MS word, and converted it with FrontPage. I could barely follow the code and it blew way up in size.  

How I look at it, unless you really enjoy this stuff (like me), by the time you fiddle with all the web stuff you could have cut some wood. Better to pay a hosting service $6-$10 a month. imo

[Jeff]

Again risky business for a business.  The cheap registar companies are a real risk. There have been a couple occasions of fly by night registar companies "Going out of business"  The domains they take care of lost in red tape for months or worse. Worse being conversion by the "new" owners of the company. Stick to the big name registar companys for security. They are not that expensive.

Cheap hosting= undependable and no support when you really need it, or slow support at best.  No support for advanced web hosting such as php or cgi. Hidden charges if you do use such things.

Word processers that export to html are a joke unless you are doing very, very basic formatting.

Believe me, I have been on the professional end of the web site stuff since 1998 and ran into all the problems. 1998 does not sound like a long time. but on the internet its equivilent of starting in on the industrial revolution at about the time of the invention of the phonograph

[Bibbyman]

About Front Page....

If you click on the Bibbyman web site icon to the left you'll see we've got a pretty snappy web site.  I can't take all the credit.  I basically ripped off the design from another web site and modified the heck out of it.  I've got more than a little programming experience and some formal training in HTML code.  Plus, Jeff helped me out here and there. ;)

Anyway,  I did the initial work in Front Page Express on a different PC than I now have.  I found out a couple of weeks ago that one of the link paths had changed and no longer worked. (You've got that 'not found' message before I'm sure).  Well,  the other web site moved what I was linked to and my path didn't work anymore.

So... Should be easy to update the link and re-upload the index.htm page to the FF web server.  No step for a stepper.

First I brought up my web site in Explorer and filed that page in a folder on my local hard drive.  I went in and re-assigned the new link and filed it.   I uploaded the page to the FF server and then brought it up to see if it indeed worked.  Well,  it was mostly an empty shell.  None of the 20 or so graphics were there.  They all had that little empty box with an X in it because it couldn't find the file path back to where they were filed on the FF server. (All that http://www..stuff..../more/stuff)

Front Page, in it's own wisdom,  had downloaded the page to my hard drive as I expected but it also created a folder and downloaded all the graphics as well.  That wouldn't have been so bad but it also went into the code and converted all the paths from where they were on the FF to this folder.  So.  I had to go in and re-edit each one link to get them to point to the pictures and graphics on the FF server.

Got the graphics back and then I noted that the Sitemeter stuff was not displayed or working – that's the counter at the bottom of the website page that tells how many people have view your website.  Looked at the code and lo and behold,  Front Page had changed the couple of link paths to that function too.   Now I was in trouble because I didn't know what the link path to the Bibbyman folder was back to the Sitemeter web site.

I went to the Sitemeter web site but I couldn't remember the password to my account.  Fortunately,  I had my account number so I was able to have them e-mail me with my password.  Got in and was able to use their code examples to re-establish contact.

Having done this on one page was bad enough but I had also updated the 'Current activities" page at the same time so I had two pages to fix and de-bug.

In short,  what should have been 20-30 minute job at the most took a couple of hours just because Front Page took over and did the thinking for me.

Maybe there was something I could have done better but it still makes me mad. >:(

[Viking]

yeah front page is good for newbies to website desing , so i suggest that its how i started out, now  i can jus make a text document, write the code and save it as html, or php whichever im making at the time.

[Bibbyman]

Viking,  

If'n you've got a web site,  why don't you have it listed in your profile?

BTW.

Anybody note that ARKANSAWYER has his web site up and going?

ARKANSAWYER