Funny, that's about what people pay me to MAKE a website for them. Stock templates run the gamut from good to horrible - and unless you know the underlying technologies you can't make that determination. Take the 'god loves you' think in your sig - layout broken in Opera and IE on large font machines, crap flash animation pushing anything resembling content clean off the page at lower resolutions, an ungodly 286k of scripts in 15 files, 31k HTML file when there's not even 2k of content, iframes so it's an accessability /FAIL/, DHTML only menu (also a collossal /FAIL/), absurd amount of inlined presentation and styling, tables for layout for no good reason, outdated markup styling, 61 validation errors, etc, etc, etc. Don't even get me started on the other two links (both of which are horribly broken layout too) - nothing like that 30k of HTML for 3.5k of page content eh? Hell, the scripts ALONE are twice the size of the largest site I'd comfortably put online today.
There's just a lot of bad sites out there, I'm trying to get the people making these sites to wake up. Slapping together some existing template rarely results in websites worth a damn - and if they do make money, it often has little to do with the value of their content and everything to do with gaming the search engines, absurd amounts of advertising, and generating single visit traffic. A lot of it is because your advertising driven sitebuilders take shortcuts, usually because they view the whole concept of a website as a get rich quick scheme or marketing scam. You see it with the people who's only interest in SEO is for advertising revenue (which usually indicates whatever the site itself is about has no value) - I'm gonna laugh when the bottom falls out AGAIN during dotcom bust 2.0... I say, I say, that's a joke son. (only partly, it's not a question of if, but a question of when) The HTML and CSS area's of forums like DP, SitePoint, IWDN - they're filled to the gills with people basically asking "Why does my rubbish template I didn't even originally write that started wtih hordes of invalid markup filled with outdated methodologies and overcomplicated redundancies and eye candy bullshit not work in ____fill in the blank____ after I made changes to it that I don't even understand" - It gets tiring seeing people throw silver bullet fixes at BAD CODE that should, as I keep telling people, be thrown out and started over with MODERN coding techniques like minimalist semantic markup, separation of presentation from content, image count reduction, etc, etc. I generally find saying "Oh just grab a template" offensive and certainly not the way to teach anyone how to do things. NOT that I think templates should even be made before the copy is written - otherwise you are shoehorning the most important part of a site - it's CONTENT into a template that it may not have been meant to.
LOL I get it (the chicken). I was suggesting a template because the author of this post was having trouble making a decent looking site and a template is a shortcut. SEO is my specialty and I think If you read my previuos posts you would not be trying to educate me. I agree that the majority of website owners are just looking for a get rich quick fix. The reality is that SEO and traffic generation is the backbone of any online business.
Actually, I was putting together some Ikea-imitations in my new house yesterday and then understood what the OP meant: there's putting together Ikea furniture, and then there's being a carpenter/furnituremaker. Templates are Ikea furniture... sometimes done well and sometimes the holes don't even frikkin' line up and you end up with too many little useless nails and not enough screws. The difference though is that when you are done with one of the better pieces of furniture, you should not have extra holes or screws. With templates you always do. You meant... "the backbone of any online get-rich-quick scheme." A true business does or sells something and abides by all the normal rules and manners of business. If you have great business practises, good rapport with customers and have a great product, SEO and traffic mean nothing and don't have to. People don't go to, for example, Amazon.com because of its great SEO. They go there to buy books or whatever and they tend to get those things on time with little hassle. They don't "generate traffic", they sell something people want and thus the people go there. Traffic is a by-product of people going to and from something that interests them. Like enlightenment, it is not the goal, just a means.
Exactly - SEO is good for starting websites to get people there first... but people are acting like it's the be-all end all and throwing around phrases like "the backbone of any online business." Forgetting that the most important part of a site is the CONTENT - You can apply a whole truckload of black hat SEO rubbish to the crappiest page out there, and all you are doing is polishing a turd. 90% of SEO has turned into an obsession with the one time visitor to sleaze yourself some advertising revenue, forgetting the more important concepts of client retention, word of mouth, quality of service and a whole host of other things that are the difference between a PR8 site that see's 95% of it's 10,000 unique visitors never visiting again, or the PR5 site that see's 90% of it's 2,000+ a month as return visitors who go there almost every day. Before pagerank was devalued I'd say the first... five or so pages to turn up on my google searches were next to useless and not related to what I was looking for - it's gotten a little better, but I personally am really sick of rubbish websites with little or no content of value coming up ahead of the decent sites in searches JUST because of black hat trickery... But then I'm one of the jackasses who will actually report websites for abuse. (Google REALLY needs to implement per-user blacklists. Sites I do NOT want to EVER see in my search results - like say... Experts Exchange - I'm not paying to use a forums jackasses... Be interesting if they implemented it and then released a list of what sites people don't like - a top 100 of 'the worst' as it were) In any case as I said in another thread recently: That last sentance being borne out by sites like Amazon, E-Bay and even Google (the last of those I'd not trust to code their way out of a piss soaked paper bag with a hole in the bottom)
Misha I am also just learning web design. I first started with WYSIWYG programs like dreamweaver and hoped to skip all of the tough coding part. I soon realized that without a solid foundation of the code I could not design correctly, not to mention fix errors. I recommend you start with video tutorials if you are a visual learner and a good css/xhtml book if you learn better that way. Check out the Lynda CSS video series, specifically the CSS for designers since they never even go into design view or use the CSS tool (just straight code). Then you should go through the css guide on http://w3schools.com/ Then some other specific video tutorials like on http://css-tricks.com/videos/ And once you grasp the code and how pages are built use the Web Developer Toolbar for firefox - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60 - to see how some of the most popular pages are designed. I find this to be very helpful and also it should show you why good clean css/xhtml is important (the old school table sites look ugly and clunky). Hope this helps.
Yeah, deathshadow mentioned this, the sole value of SEO-anything is when starting out. But traffic is still not The Goal (I understand what you meant, and agree with you on your last post).
Traffic is ALWAYS the goal - the question is do you want to build a tourist trap that a million people visit every year but only come back once every decade, or an expressway that several thousand people drive every day to work.
There are many online web design turorials availbale.........you have to devote some time and follow the tutorail step by step..... one day you will be able to design stunning website using dreamweaver....
That's how I learnt, and I think it's the better way to go. Dreamweaver, however, is great for testing big applications. Dreamweaver can wait until you know HTML without having to think about it. Until then, Notepad++ is quite a nice tool I'd give you more rep, but I think I already gave you some today
I have hand coded my web pages -- HTML/XHTML/XHTML+RDFa, XML, CSS, PHP, JS, RDF, RDFa, RSS -- for the past several years using the text Editor of HTML-Kit James
aoa all designer i do work in adopt very good but i donot know dreamweare. I can't get on with Dreamweaver. I recommend MS Expression Web and Adobe Photoshop for the graphics.
look into new ways to display content and pay particular focus on the CSS as this is how the page is layed out and how it works. The HTML is just basic code and content with the class names linking the css to the html This is where you will make your page look better if anywhere