# Total novice needs webpage info



## K-Man (Sep 11, 2004)

I've been putting it off... but I guess it's unavoidable:

I need to build a personal webpage. Trouble is, about the only thing I really understand is what a hyperlink is! 

What I need to know is this: What is the *easiest*, cheapest way for me to begin?

I know how much everyone loves 'Dreamweaver', but I'm telling you now that it won't suit my needs. It is far to costly to buy, and by the time I figured out any free trial version, it would be expired! 

What I need is a very simple way to construct a webpage, with just an opening page, featuring a menu, and hyperlinks to a few pages of text, and a few 'galleries' for my artwork. I'd like to be able to show 'thumbnail' versions of my work on the gallery pages, which can be clicked for a full-size view.

(Oh... one other thing: It would be helpful if the thing would adjust itself to each visitors screen resolution -- hate those horizontal scrollbars! -- and I'd like to avoid annoying junk like active x controls and such -- don't want visitors getting frustrated!)

That's really about all I need for now, so almost any software would suffice, I would think.

I have FrontPage Express, but I don't really understand it, and I don't think I would be happy with the results from it anyway. It's much too rigid in where you are allowed to place things on the page. (Remember: I'm an artist... I want to have control over the page layout. If only FrontPage worked like PowerPoint!)

Trouble is: I'm also a completely clueless beginner at web-authoring.

Any ideas?

Thanks!


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## bopdude (Oct 21, 2001)

Hi there K-Man, for an easy to use package try looking athttp://www.moonfruit.com/, i've used it in the past when i first started out, it was an easy, no fuss, web site builder with all " tools " included, really easy.

See what you think and let us know


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## southernlady (May 6, 2004)

K-Man, try 1st Page 2000 from http://www.evrsoft.com/ They have a free version and it has 4 levels!

You could also look at these tutorials here:
Tutorials for html:

http://www.w3schools.com/

http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/

http://www.geocities.com/davelanthorn/davepage.html

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/

http://www.lettice.net/tutorial/

http://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/t...html/index.php3

http://developers.evrsoft.com/

http://www.earthweb.com/

http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.html

http://www03.pogo.com/index.jsp?sls=2

http://www.pongo.com/

http://www.virtuallyignorant.com/webtutor.htm

http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/faqs

http://manda.com/frames/ (this is a frames tutorial)

http://www.fontfinder.ws/ (finds fonts)

This is a very good site for almost anything about web
and web devlopement, including the

free classes:

http://webdesign.about.com/library/...ng/bl_begin.htm

Color sites:

http://www.bagism.com/colormaker/

http://www.colormix.com/

http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/php/misc/colours.php

http://webdesign.about.com/cs/color/ht/htrgbhexwindows.htm

http://www.yvg.com/twrs/RGBConverter.html

http://www.geocities.com/t_geetha2000/colors.html

http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/reference/color_codes/

Two EXCELLENT programs to download for color are Pixie
and colorbox:

Pixie: http://www.nattyware.com/?m31

Colorbox: www.kobayashi.com

K-Man, have you thought about WHERE you will park your web site? Liz


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## wefts (May 27, 2002)

I have been looking at all the great html sites listed, so many of them have flashing or animated images , which make it hard for me to focus on the content ( I get visually trigered head aches from all the colors and flashing . if I am trying to read , but not if I am just looking at images ) 
I usually just aviod pages with music or distracting movement but these pages have content I really want to understand, and as a beginner that is confusing enough 
Is there a way to have the screan show plain text so it is easier to follow ? Or so I can print out the pages to read a few times so it sinks in better ?


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## southernlady (May 6, 2004)

Are you using IE as your browser? If so, try downloading Firefox and then just don't add the plugin's that are needed. That will cut out the java and flash and other problems. Liz


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## wefts (May 27, 2002)

Thanks I will give that a try . I really hate the animations ,can't seem to focus at all with something flashing on the page!


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## southernlady (May 6, 2004)

Firefox can be found at www.mozilla.org Liz


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## Rollin' Rog (Dec 9, 2000)

It has been reported that the link posted in post 2 will automatically try to download Macromedia flash. This is true if flash is disabled or not a recent version, otherwise it simply runs a flash ad. The same is true for virtually any website that uses Macromedia flash.

KMan for the problem you reported after using that link, try going to Start > Shutdown > restart in MS-DOS mode. At the c:> prompt enter:

*scanreg /restore*

and choose the last started registry just before this happened.


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## K-Man (Sep 11, 2004)

Ah... DOS! Now you're talking my language!  

Thanks Rollin' Rog! I'll give it a shot! :up:


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## K-Man (Sep 11, 2004)

Well... here's a good one for you Rollin' Rog:

First time I tried to restore, the system couldn't locate the driver for Norton AV.  This was a restore from 10-13-04. ZoneAlarm did load up before Norton as usual though.

Second time, Norton loads up first again. This was a restore from 10-14-04.

Everything seems to be working just fine now though! 

Oh well! :up: 

I'll keep an eye on it for a couple of days, but for now it looks like it's fixed!

(Maybe I can actually get this thread back to the *original* subject now! 

Thanks Rollin' Rog!


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## K-Man (Sep 11, 2004)

K-Man said:


> (Maybe I can actually get this thread back to the *original* subject now!


Then again...


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## treespirit (Oct 19, 2004)

Or you could always use Geocites, it's easy and good for beginners.


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## BillC (May 29, 2003)

Here is a totally free yet very powerful HTML editor called  WebDwarf . It works under wysiwyg format (meaning _what you see is what you get_). It also has a built in FTP engine so you can load your site to a host server. I'm really high on this program.

About a host server...you should first check with your own ISP, they may include space in your service. Next, 'Google' "free web hosts" and you'll get a lot of hits. One I've used is called FreeWebs.com No ads required on your site and extra services on an a la carte bases. Good luck.


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## K-Man (Sep 11, 2004)

Thanks to treespirit and BillC!

treespirit: I'm familiar with geocities. I'm sure it has advantages for beginners like me, but in my experience surfing the web, geocities sites in general seem riddled with pop-ups, and I avoid them like the plague. No offense intended, really!... I'm grateful for your response! :up:  

BillC: Yes, this sounds interesting. I definitely need the wysiwyg aspect. One question though: I have read in many articles that wysiwyg web-authoring is bad for HTML errors, and adds a lot of un-necessary code... Know anything about this?

Thank you both, most sincerely! I am so new at this that it is scary!   My main concerns are that it be easy to get my page up and running, and that the site itself be as user-friendly as possible. I'm begining to think that these two goals are mutually exclusive!  

Thanks again!


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## southernlady (May 6, 2004)

K-Man,


> I'm familiar with geocities. I'm sure it has advantages for beginners like me, but in my experience surfing the web, geocities sites in general seem riddled with pop-ups, and I avoid them like the plague.


Geocities has fewer popups than most. Compared to Lycos, it's non-existent and the banner ads they add to your web page is minimal and far less annoying than the one that Lycos adds (Lycos is Tripod/Angelfire). I switched from Angelfire to Geocities just for that reason. The banner ads were truly annoying on Angelfire.



> I definitely need the wysiwyg aspect. One question though: I have read in many articles that wysiwyg web-authoring is bad for HTML errors, and adds a lot of un-necessary code... Know anything about this?


Any wysiwyg editor adds code that you might not need to your project. Some are worse than others. Frontpage is THE worst. Stay away from it, it will bloat your project all out of proportion.

The only true CLEAN editor is to code it yourself on notepad. Liz


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## K-Man (Sep 11, 2004)

Thanks Liz!

Yeah, I got to thinking about it, and you're right: *Tripod* is the one I was thinking of in regards to the pop-ups. Don't see much Lycos stuff, but it's pretty similar. I also hate the way that Tripod and Lycos bring up that little window over on the side of your browser. Sometimes I use the f11 key to run my browser as close to full-screen as possible, because I hate having to scroll all over the place just to read stuff... and these sites try to make my view even worse.

I actually *have* had trouble with Geocities sites, but most of those are in Asia, where half the sites are problematic anyway.  LOL

(Never have figured out why so many Asian websites seem linked to porn stuff. I'm not even sure if it is intentional by the owners of those sites, or maybe it's just a popular type of site to hijack.)

I should mention: I already have 5 Mb of free space for my webpage from my ISP. I just need a way to assemble and upload my page. I can't for the life of me understand how anyone could know what a page will look like without a wysiwig editor though!

Thanks again!


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## southernlady (May 6, 2004)

That's where you use a wysiwyg editor that uses as little bloat as possible. I found one on www.nonags.com that looks very interesting and is a compliment to notepad actually. I don't know if you would like to try it. I don't know anything about it myself but I think I'm gonna give it a whirl too. http://tinyurl.com/6qsmw Liz


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## K-Man (Sep 11, 2004)

Thanks again! Looks interesting!

On another note: Do you know anything about using CorelDraw's FTP capabilities for webpage construction? I recently received CorelDraw 9 as a gift from a (very nice!) person, and saw that it has this capability.

Thanks!


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## southernlady (May 6, 2004)

Okay, this is what I found on CorelDraw and publishing to the web: 


> Publishing to the Web
> You can ensure that your CorelDRAW files and objects publish to HTML successfully by setting document elements to be Web-compatible, selecting the settings you want, and checking Preflight issues. You can then publish to HTML. The resulting HTML code and images can be used in HTML authoring software for creating a Web site or page.


It has the FTP capabilities, I just haven't found it.

I have CorelDraw as well  Liz


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## K-Man (Sep 11, 2004)

Yeah... the amount of stuff contained in this software boggles my brain!  

Just trying to learn the software itself is complicated. Trying to learn web-authoring at the same time is like trying to learn to ride a bike and learn to juggle, all at the same time, when you didn't know how to do either one before! LOL  

You know, way back when... I used to program in basic on an old TI99 4a computer. It would take pages and pages of programming to do the simplest things. This is how HTML seems to me now!

My real problem, is that I want to design my webpage, and determine how it will look and work... but I want someone else to do all the work for me!  I have used "PowerPoint" to create things which behave like a website, but most web-editors I've found don't have an interface even remotely similar to it. (Of course; PowerPoint creates ENORMOUS files!  )

Thanks for the info!


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