Websites for dummies...

[Gorth]

I have his little pet project of mine that I hope to get off the ground some day. It is basically just intended to be a small fansite/memorial site. No news updates, no user accounts, no forums, no sign up for mailing lists or similar. Just a simple tribute site with a few simple pages showing something. If possible a small "gallery" type thing, but not required.

 

Last website I created was handwritten asp code (about a decade ago) that produced the content. Not an experience I care to repeat. Anybody out there familiar with simple site building software for generating basically dumb html code of the kind Frontpage would once have done?

 

Hacker unfriendly would be considered an extra bonus

 

If not, ah well, then I still got notepad and my html tag reference list.

[Morgoth]

Adobe Dreamweaver.

[Spider]

If you're writing the HTML yourself, look at Notepad+. It's a text editor but gives you syntax highlighting, which is very nice. No autocomplete that I know of, but that isn't necessarily a drawback. It's also free.

 

If you want a wysiwyg editor, it is hard to go wrong with dreamweaver, if you don't mind the cost. It also has a very good text editor mode, but I find it hard to justify the cost if that's what you want. It has a 30 day trial I think, so there's that. It does have the whole site manager things which makes it easier to organize your files, and deploy them. Still don't think it's worth it.

 

Personally I would go with Notepad+. Well, personally I would go with Visual Studio, but when we're talking about not worth the cost, this is the prime example. There is the free version in Visual Web Developer Express (or something along those lines), but if you're not writing code (ie Asp.Net) it is probably a bit complex. You certainly can use it to just write html, and it will give you autocomplete options and tag suggestions. It will also make it easier to organize your site, although it will add a few unneeded folders to your project (because it assumes you're doing programming as well).

 

So yeah, I think there's where I would start.

[Gorth]

I use Visual Studio 2010 regularly at work

 

Just looking for the lazy way out of something I normally don't do. Dreamweaver does indeed look interesting but I gave up trying to figure out Adobes website. They either want to sell me big bundles of CS stuff I don't need or student only versions which I don't qualify for. Doesn't look like you can buy just the software you need. VS it is then at the moment.

[CoM_Solaufein]

Dreamweaver is your friend. Well at least Macromedia's version of it. Don't know what how good it is since Adobe bought out Macromedia.

[Walsingham]

I use the pub.

 

Have friend who knows how to design a website. Take them to the pub and discuss options while you buy beer. Have them agree to make your website on promise of more beer. They make website. They get beer. You get to drink beer with your friends. What's not to like?

[neckthrough]

If your hosting server supports it, I would recommend using a Content-Management System (CMS) such as Drupal (drupal.org) or Wordpress (wordpress.org). Note that this Wordpress isn't exactly the same as the Wordpress.com blogging website - the former powers the latter. These CMS systems are free, have a gentle learning curve and come with a plethora of user-created themes and plugins - including gallery plugins for displaying images, plugins to automatically re-format your webpage for mobile/tablet browsing, etc.

 

I was in a similar state of mind as you are now when I started down this path. I had created my personal webpage years ago using hand-written HTML, but was interested in trying out a more "packaged" solution as long as the look, feel and usability was simple and elegant and the whole thing didn't take too much of my time. Wordpress ended up working really well for me, but I'm sure any of the other popular CMS's would have worked just as well.

[Gorth]

I'll check out those two, thanks

[Walsingham]

I was talking to the Prince's Trust last week about enterpreneurship. Maybe give them a call and enquire about how you could support entrepreneurs with your site?

[Spider]

If you're looking for a CMS and want to stay on the .Net side of thing, I can recommend an open source one called Umbraco. You are using Visual Studio after all

[Walsingham]

I was*snip* site?

 

I've completely misunderstood what you were doing, haven't I?

[Gorth]

I was*snip* site?

 

I've completely misunderstood what you were doing, haven't I?

I'm not going to ask what you were doing last night