Website Builders--Please Read, not selling anything!!

[Different Socks]

Recently lost out on 2 opportunities to have top notch people build a website for me. Now I am thinking of doing it myself, but I am low on the scale of pc literacy. Can anyone give me the name of a good and free website that odes a great job of showing how to build my own website? Something that takes you thru it step by step.

[RGB]

Is this just a personal website that you're looking to build? What exactly is its purpose?

[Skyline]

Our businesses use Network Solutions (www.networksolutions.com).

You can buy your URLs there, and a website hosting package which includes an online reasonably easy-to-learn website builder tool. Also free human being support on technical issues by phone (not sayin' they all speak English as a first language tho...)

If you need every bell and whistle, there is software out there like Adobe's Dreamweaver but it has quite a learning curve. Pretty good tho if you have the time and inclination. By all means stay away from Microcrap's Front Page imitation website software.

[Mags]

Look into a content management system.

Something like Joomla or even Wordpress does need some techie know how to install. But many webhosting companies now offer this software as an option already installed when you host a domain with them. There are others, too.



The beauty of a CMS is that once it is installed, they are easy to use, manage and write articles. I am not a web designer so it is a great way for someone like to get a website going that is functional without worrying about lots of coding. If you can click a mouse, you can manage a CMS.


Good luck!

[mweinstone]

spiders build websites. human beings build campsights.

[JaxHiker]

As Walkin' asked, what for? You can't really expect to get good input when we have no clue what you're trying to accomplish. The answers you'd get for building a generic personal site with limited interaction would be entirely different from those if you were looking to build an e-commerce site with a shopping cart, SSL, etc.

What level of customization do you need? Be forewarned that while the click-n-build sites will get you up and running quickly they can just as quickly tie your hands making future enhancements difficult at best and typically impossible.

[waywardfool]

For a quick, easy WYSIWYG html editor, check out Seamonkey, from Mozilla (the folks that bring you Firefox and Thunderbird). Does a pretty good job, end code is usually cleaner than Frontpage.

[Blissful]

I use Homestead to build my author site, but it isn't free. I pay $100 a year

[RGB]

If you are indeed building a personal website, I would use Bluehost in conjunction with Wordpress. Or you could just use Tumblr probably. Just throwing stuff out there since I don't know your intentions. You can edit the CSS of themes on Wordpress and personalize it a bit more, avoiding building a site completely from scratch.

There is no way to avoid a high learning curve if you want to build a quality website for yourself from scratch. Believe me, I tried. I'm going through a Dreamweaver book currently, and even then you need to at least know HTML and CSS.

And if you are wanting to build an e-commerce type website, and you are computer-illiterate, you are better off shelling out the money to a designer if you don't have time to learn a lot.

I would show you my Wordpress site but it's down as I am trying to build a site from scratch myself.

[RGB]

I use Homestead to build my author site, but it isn't free. I pay $100 a year

That's not a lot of bang for your buck. I would definitely urge you to switch to Bluehost w/Wordpress. It would look a lot better and be more user-friendly for the same price. You can get your own personal domain from Wordpress for $15/year (lauraleebliss.com instead of http://lauraleebliss.homestead.com/lrbweb.html) and hosting at bluehost is $83.40/year. So a lot more for the same price. Also you can host unlimited domains from bluehost.

In the end it's none of my business, but I couldn't leave it alone as a designer.

[JaxHiker]

Dreamweaver is probably one of the nicer tools if you're going to go that route. My beef with it and Frontpage (the worst offender) is that they throw a lot of code in your pages which clutters things up. Maybe things have changed, though, since I haven't used these in about 10 years.

I've been very impressed with Wordpress and I'm using it for all of the sites I maintain right now. It's very flexible and I've gotten great feedback from my users.

fwiw you can register a domain for less than $15/yr. You just have to look around. I use gkg.net out of Texas for most of my domains. Be wary of the places that lure you in for 2 or 3 bucks a month for hosting since it'll most likely only last a year.

Again, though, w/o really knowing what the OP is after we're all just pissing in the wind. How can you even recommend a host w/o knowing what features/functionality are needed?

Blissful, what's your site about? I was blocked by our corp proxy: Your request was denied because its content is categorized as: "Suspicious".

[Sly]

If you have a web host you can try Kompozer it's a free WYSIWYG web editor. It's about as easy as it gets and with a few online tutorials you should be able to produce something decent.

[JaxHiker]

So where'd the OP go?

[chief]

I agree with Mags all the way. So many hosts these days have free-open source CMS apps already installed for your use.

[Ladytrekker]

GoDaddy.com has some nice web builders that are easy to follow and you can also buy your web name from them.

[Jelly-Bean]

www.yola.com Free for basic service which is excellent. I paid 18.00 per year for web address.

[JaxHiker]

GoDaddy.com has some nice web builders that are easy to follow and you can also buy your web name from them.

Just keep in mind they seriously limit what you can do. This may not matter for some (most?) people but if your traffic grows and you want to spice it up you might hit a brick wall.

I was hired a few years ago to do some web work for a local company that chose godaddy. I couldn't even do the simplest of tasks because they blocked access to portions of the page.

I ended up moving them to another host and built the site from scratch. It was 1000 times better if for no other reason that we had full control over it.

There's a price for ease and generally that means you lose a great deal of capability. Just food for thought.

[BigHodag]

This is almost a daily question for me. Walkin' Dude gave you the best solution.

Get an account at an AYCE Internet buffet like Bluehost, Hostgator or Siteground for less than $100/year (including free domain name). Use the cPanel to install Wordpress by clicking a few buttons. Go find a free WordPress template you can live with and drop it into your templates directory.

You'll find lots of videos on using cPanel and WordPress on YouTube and within your hosts support section. WordPress also has a large support forum with answers to almost any problem you're likely to have. Our university uses WordPress for department websites due to it's low skill level.

If you need technical assistance, inquire at your local church or high school. The youth minister or guidance counselor can likely recommend a bright teen to assist you.

While GoDaddy does offer WordPress its difficult to locate in their control panel and the installation is not automatic, but scheduled. Many of my clients get confused in GoDaddy and don't use many of its features as a result.

Regarding Homestead, yes, you can build a basic site using its interface, but nearly everyone I've worked with that had a Homestead site eventually wanted to migrate to a more robust CMS like WordPress. Kigrating a website is not for the faint hearted. Much easier to choose a robust host with lots of options like Bluehost or Hostgator.

(Disclaimer: I've had business accounts on both Bluehost and Hostgator and still have at Hostgator.)

My simple ecommerce tutorial: asbtdc.ualr.edu/ecommerce