Step 3.1 – Website Software
This section applies to you IF you want to build the website for yourself AND host it on your own domain name.
If you do not want to go to the effort of doing all this, then you should probably use one of the website builder software packages provided by your hosting company. These are generally commercial products and are good, but too expensive if you want to buy the software yourself (and why should you if you can use it for free?). Or maybe you might to want to use one of the free websites available or a ready-made affiliate cookie-cutter website? Anyway, the rest of this is for the people who want to build their own website, maybe with a little help, but basically on their own (yes, there are still a few of us left over from the dark ages).
There are a number of ways to build websites, but the most common way, and probably where you should start to get a solid foundation, is called html (”hypertext markup language”), the most common coding language used to write instructions for websites.
I’m not going to propose that you go to an html class (although that’s not a bad idea), but I do propose that you find an html editor in order to build your website. As you use it, you will start to learn the most common html commands, and also how the logic is structured. I started relatively close to the top of the scale with a software package called “FrontPage” from Microsoft that was built into my upscale Office Premium package (that’s not been the case with versions after MS Office 2000). The biggest problems with FrontPage are
- It’s not 100% WYSIWYG (”What You See Is What You Get” – my version is about 95-97%),
- If you make a number of modifications, the code tends to get messy, and
- You can do it all in WYSIWYG and not get into the code at all (which may or may not be a problem).
The latest version of web-making software from Microsoft has a new name (which means that FrontPage doesn’t exist any more, at least officially) – it’s “Microsoft© Expression© Web 2″ – check it out with your favorite search engine if you’re interested, but go with your credit card in hand. This is certainly not the only upper-level website writing software, there are many others, for example Dreamweaver, that are also excellent products and that can make great websites (and big holes in your pocketbook).
There are a number of good, free or low-cost, html editors available – I chose CoffeeCup Software’s Free HTML Editor for things I cannot do or are too complicated in my version of FrontPage (for example php code and xtml). The free version has a viewer in addition to the html editor, so you can see what you’ve done but not while you’re doing it. The paid version (yes, Virginia, there is almost always a paid version these days) has all that plus a WYSIWYG editor, so you can go from there to get the look you want without fiddling around with html too much. There’s a lot of choice in the html editor software arena – take a look at your favorite search engine and choose what fit’s you best. (Note: even most text editors like MS Word have an html mode – you can write a webpage in Word, but it makes really over-complicated code!) When you learn some basic html, you can even use the text-only editor that comes with your operating system – just make sure it only writes what you type. For example, in Windows, the Editor (notepad.exe) is a straight text-only editor, but Wordpad (wordpad.exe) will put funny stuff in when you start to write html code.
I can offer almost countless options on Amazon for html instruction. I cannot vouch for any of these books, so if you find something good (or free and good) that you like, please let me know and I will feature it here!
The second part of this step (it just got to be too big to do all at one read) will follow in about a week – stay tuned!
