Looking for someone to teach me how to make a website.

I want to know how to do this from scratch, what programs I need to know. I"m pretty computer savy and have always wanted to learn this.

 

just learn how cpanel works..and ftp

 

what is cpanel and ftp?

 

well first you need to decide if you want to start of with a design done in photoshop or just with the code.

in both cases you will have to learn html/css and in the first you will have to learn photoshop too.

thats all you need to set up a static homepage.

to upload it to your webspace you will need an ftp client like filezilla.

@vmware01 your post is not very helpfull

 

how do i get photoshop? Is this something I need to buy a program for? I've heard of it before but never worked with it.

 

dude..when did you know internet?

 

Hi babytubz, there are tons of resources available online, but knowing where to get started can be very hard, there are so many different places to get information that you can get lost.

You can learn everything you need to know for free, especially if you can find people (like me) who can help you. I'm around if you have any questions, you can PM me.

Here are some good resources to get started building websites.

HTML
You can get HTML Video Tutorials for free here:
http://www.easywebtutorials.com/html-tutorial/lessons/intro.html

CSS
If you want to learn CSS, you can go several places... I like W3 Schools, no videos, but they have some cool features and training tools. You can also learn HTML here, but again, no videos.
http://www.w3schools.com

Also, you can search for virtually ANY computer-related book and download it for free at www.ebookshare.net. You will need a torrent program like utorrent (www.utorrent.com) to open the files from that site. And if you like the book and find it useful, you should consider paying for it.

Menu Builder
You can build TONS of sweet menus with the website for free. This is VERY, VERY useful! Menu construction can be a huge pain in the butt when you're brand new to web design.
http://www.izzymenu.com

Graphic Design
You WILL want to use Photoshop. Nothing out there compares to Photoshop, IMHO. You can always download the trial at adobe.com which lasts for 30 days. Just go to the Downloads tab and select "trial downloads".

You can buy an academic edition for $400 (comes with Dreamweaver and Flash and many other great programs), all you have to do is know someone who is a student in school or college, fax or email in a scanned copy of their student id and/or a report card, and you can get the discount. Also, once you own the program, the license allows you to use it for ANYTHING, not just academic uses.

Content Management Systems
Once you have the basics of HTML down, I STRONGLY suggest making the move into Joomla. Joomla will allow you to build very high quality sites. Building menus and adding pages is all done without any coding. SO many features are built it, the possibilities are limitless with Joomla. You can get premade templates (Free and Paid subscriptions) that you can customize for Joomla.
http://www.joomla.org

The learning curve can be steep with it but once you know it, it is so easy and fast to build very high quality sites.

It took me a long time to learn Joomla, because I didn't plug into the community (bad idea), but now there is a free video training course available to teach you the basics of Joomla:
http://help.joomla.org/ghop/feb2008/task167/index.html

That's a great resource for learning Joomla, it will save you lots of time.

Remember, if you want to learn fast, and if you're serious about learning, you need to get plugged into to a community of people who know stuff and start asking questions. There's a lot of time wasting things out there that a simple question to the right person will solve. You're welcome to ask me questions any time

 

read lots of tutorials
and try things out on your own

some good tutorial sites
w3schools.com (sometimes the things they teach only work for IE6 but still a good resource)
webdesignfromscratch.com

get a cheap shared hosting account
and start experimenting
use filezilla-project.org to FTP your files to the server

Trial and error is your best teacher
Ask specific questions when stuck

 

Also, sorry the links aren't clickable. DigitalPoint won't allow me to make live links until I've been here for a couple weeks or something

 

I have never had Photoshop, but I use PhotoPlus and it works out pretty well. They have a free version and a $9.99 version that are plenty powerful.

http://www.freeserifsoftware.com/software/PhotoPlus/default.asp

 

Microsoft Front Page is a good place to start. Go to the help section and read about getting started.

 

@babytubz:

Since you're completely new to web development, you have the chance to learn the Right Way® to do things without developing bad habits.

Your primary tool will be the text editor. It is the one tool you will live in, and cannot do without. Choose one that you feel comfortable using, but don't get one that is difficult to use without the mouse. The most productive editors are those you can use without touching the mouse. Be sure it has the bells and whistles that make production easier. The two most powerful and productive editors are Emacs and Vim. There are plenty of others that are good enough. MSFT's notepad is not one of them. Word processors, think Word, etc., are not text editors.

If you want to do your own graphics, or just have some familiarity, you will need an image manipulation program. There are two image types, raster and scaled vector graphics. The leading commercial programs are Photoshop and Illustrator. Neither is cheap. There are free software apps that are just as good as, and a bit better than the commercial apps. The GIMP will do everything for web graphics that Photoshop does, and does it for free. Inkscape is an svg editor that surpasses Illustrator in results and ease of use (per my graphics consultant, a long time, pre WWW, PS and Illustrator user). Inkscape is also free. You should also look into Imagemagick along the way. It's a command line suite of graphics applications. There is a plugin to PHP for server-side image generation, among other wonderful things. Consider taking data from a DB and plotting a graph, or automagically generating thumbnails from the originals, or adding watermarks on the fly ….

Now, where to learn? Start with the tutorials at htmldog.com. I saw w3schools recommended, but they're a bit outdated. I wouldn't bother with them now, though I did, many years ago. After the tutorials go over to Opera's site. They've done a good job of bringing together many of the top people in the field to write articles on just about every phase of best practice web development. See Introduction to The Web Standards Curriculum/Table of Contents.

Cautions:

1. Do not beg, borrow, steal or buy Dreamweaver. It will slow the learning process, and turn out crap for code along the way.
2. Do not even think about slicing and dicing your Photoshop or other graphic to export as html.
3. In fact do not export as html from any application until you have mastered html and css, else you won't know how to clean up the crap.
4. Forums are an excellent place from which to learn. Keep in mind that many posters aren't any further along than you, and are simply sharing their ignorance. Others with more knowledge are more dangerous as much of what they know just isn't so. (Obviously that isn't true in my case, but …. )

HTML and css are not rocket surgery, but there is a level of real thinking involved. If all you're after is to be a button pusher, get DW and PS, and slice and dice to your heart's content. If you want to be a web developer, or find out if that's what you want, dig in and learn the craft.

cheers,

gary

 

I 2nd FrontPage. I know people that have never edited a web page before and they can get up and running quickly with FrontPage

 

I can only recomend you to do what kk5st explained.

and don't touch frontpage it'S mircosoftcrap and won'T make you learn html/css

 

Excellent.

I'll add my bit: cross browser testing (testing in every web browser) is very important.

These here are the browsers you should get:

• IE6/IE7 - The most used browsers. One of these should already be installed on your system (assuming you are using Windows), but for the other one, grab IETester.
• Opera, my personal favourite, and a good browser for standards.
• Firefox, the second most widely used browser, again good for standards testing.
• Safari - the default browser from Apple. Not my cup of tea, but necessary testing.

Just download and install all them and you should be good to go.


Good luck,

Josh

 

sry but do you know if IETester is also working on macs???

@babytubz there is also a small difference between ff2 and ff3 you should keep this in mind

 

I highly doubt IETester will work on Mac .

You may wanna check out VirtualBox or Parallels and running Windows in a virtual machine.

 

thx well I checked it out and I found a version you can install on a mac

http://www.kronenberg.org/ies4osx/

did not check if it's working but wanted to let you know

 

Looks decent, but I don't think it has the latest IE

Good to know though, thanks.

 

I use Xerver
It's sponsored by google and it is really cool
just visit: www . javascript . nu