I want to create a website, and I know how to get a domain and everything, but I don’t know where to go from there.
I just want to play around with the Idea to get used to it, but i have no idea where to start :(. Eventually I will be doing a major overhaul to our teams website, but right now I know nothing about it so I am trying to gain experience!
Do you guys know where to go next?
Thanks for your help!!
First you need to figure out what the website will contain. It could be about anything…mine somehow started out as The Selectric Typewriter Museum, and now has all kinds of wierd stuff.
Then start writing, adding photos or whatever to make it interesting.
Have fun! you’ll learn a lot…
If you don’t already have software, download NVU It’s easy and free.
Check out this thread from WebmasterWorld Lost of great info there.
Well I have a basic Idea of what it will contain. I am thinking of a progress page for a small robot i am working on designing.
That link you gave was very helpful!! The problem I have is that i dont know where to go to start. Do I need a server? Or how do I design it, and what program to use? those kind of things.
do you guys recommend Microsoft visual web developer?
I will explore that site you gave!!
How about just starting a blog at a site like Wordpress.com or Blogspot.com. You could easily accomplish what you are trying to do, unless the intent is to learn how to build the website with things like PHP, or ASP.Net, or some other development language.
Ya I intend to learn how to build sites from scratch through things like PHP… I have looked into blogspot.com sort of things, and they dont look as fun as it would be to create it from scratch 
(and what do you learn from just using someone elses site??)
For team 1323’s website, we use dreamweaver. I myself like dreamweaver because you don’t have to fully know html. As long as you know some your fine. But for us, we get free stuff due to the fact that our school buys a ton of Autodesk and Adobe products.
If you have any questions IM or PM.
No. The Microsoft products are geared to their technologies, asp,.net.
There are many freebie webhosts or you can opt for a low cost one. I suggest the low cost route (site5 , 1&1, Godaddy)
You will have issues pointing a domain name to a freebie site.
Get a linux/apache package with cpanel. Stay away from a windows server.
John, I have to disagree with you, while I think Linux servers are wonderful Microsoft servers are also quite handy if you know how to set them up. Where I work we have servers that have not had a minute of unscheduled down time in a year. When we do have downtime it is mostly for upgrades (hardware and software) and those times are known over a month in advance.
My suggestion, before paying for a server use XAMP (google it) to test out your code on a local machine. Depending on what language you want to do I would suggest different software. If you want to use .Net Visual Studio is the recommended app. For PHP development I would recommend notepad++ (or your code editor of choice) As for HTML development, notepad++ again is my developer of choice on Windows. On OS X I use Textmate for all HTML/PHP development.
Only once you have learned the basic skills would I rent space on a server and buy a domain name. No point to be paying for it to be sitting out there unused.
A good starting place for html coding is the w3 schools
Even if Andrew and I disagree, there are many options out there.
How is the current team site hosted? I am sure they could set up a directory for you. You would be learning in the environment you are working toward.
hth
John is right there are many options out there, it depends on your needs. First step when choosing a server is figuring those out.
Of course, w3schools, how could I forget. They also have tutorials on PHP, best resource for references however is php.net.
Actually, Microsoft Web 2.0 is the program you want to use. You can get Expression Studio for free if you are high school or college student.
If you just want to make a progress page for a small robot, then you can do just about anything…the software you use should be the software you want to use on a larger project.
You can use very simple html tags with a text editor like notepad to make a simple web page.
I agree that putting it on the existing team host is a great idea, it won’t cost you anything and will force you to learn how to work with that host.
for non-coding cms try dotnetnuke and drupal…and just google search cms…
I’m developing our new team site in an Ubuntu 9.04 Server setup with mod-wsgi & python on Django framework. Though, where you should start in order to learn is through basic semantics of HTML, and then learn basic PHP. Once you grasp solid understanding (note: not knowledge) of PHP, you should be able to crank some cool stuff out with documentation handy. Check out tizag.com and W3’s website.
Thanks for the help guys, I will learn some HTML, which isn’t really that difficult, and probably make a basic site, and then just go from their!!
Yeah, a good path to take is: Learn HTML&CSS&JS (The static stuff), then move on to dynamic stuff like Python or PHP (or ASP) and then move on to web framework stuff (this isn’t really necessary, but you may be able to crank out really cool stuff).
Well you have a domain and a webserver, good job. that’s about half the battle right there for most new web designers (:
for me, the first thing i learned when i developed my first site was PHP, and some basic MySQL queries. trust me, if you can understand that and make something basic (like a database-driven news page), you will very quickly learn how to move along from there. I sort of learned html on the side as i learned php, when i realized i needed to format stuff.
personally, i learned the basics of html here: http://www.htmlgoodies.com/tutorials/getting_started/
have fun, and read the manuals carefully (-;
If you want ASP.NET, you dont need a windows server! you can use apache with the mono mod on linux.
For a ASP.NET editor, defiantly Visual Web Developer Express. For PHP, Eclipse PDT (http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/) It has syntax highlighting, auto completion for PHP, HTML, JS and CSS, PHP debugging (I find this hard to get working), and a few other nice features, like being able to install add-ons, like subversion
You can also use Microsoft Publisher to create the web site for you. It’s pretty easy to use if you have no experience at all. You can choose from templates with color schemes and have something up and running in a few hours that looks professional. You can edit the html, but then the next time you create the site, it overwrites your changes, so it’s really for creating a web site from their user interface. It also handles clicking on other links, moving from page to page, etc.
If you want to learn html, using notepad.exe is very basic, and you’ll spend a lot of time figuring out html syntax. You will spend a lot of time getting things to look decent. This is for hard-core html learners.
If you want to learn ASP.NET, using Microsoft Visual Studio, you can create a web site very quickly, using their user interface, but you will need to learn VB.NET or C# to be able to do any processing of user input. If you’re just displaying status, showing images, etc., you probably won’t need any code behind except for moving from one page to another. There are plenty of examples of code for anything you want to do by googling it.