I’ve been studying web design at my community college for the last couple of years.
I’m an “older” student, possibly even The Oldest Student- already have a BA and MA, too. Doing this for fun and also with an eye to career changing. I figure I can do web work from my bed in the nursing home if I have to.
I can design and create fully functional web sites. I don’t hand-code-- I’ve used Flash mostly, and Fireworks and Dreamweaver-- although I’m not entirely ignorant of HTML. In my classes, I’ve probably created 15-20 multi-page web sites on various topics. A couple are actually on the internet at the moment.
But I’m lacking the knowledge of how to upload and maintain sites. I don’t know where to go for that kind of information. I have a friend who’s an artist- quite a good watercolorist- and she wants me to design a web site for her, and I know I can do that. But as for the ins and outs of making it a reality on the internet… there I feel quite inadequate.
Should I be taking some web classes in the computer department at my school? Are there some basic books or tutorial sites on the internet that can break this down into clear steps? Any advice on how to get the next chunk of knowledge that I need to be able to design AND maintain web sites?
(P.S. In your replies- if any- please address me as if you were speaking to a four-year old whose first language is not English. Thank you.)
There you will learn about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is an area that websites conflict on. You need to learn to do best of both worlds
These sites are going to give you some direction on what interests you the most. Then you can start off by learning the most interesting parts first and go from there
It sounds to me like you’re missing the technical side of things. For instance, a general understanding of the client/server model. If I understand your issues correctly, you’re basically curious about system administration (which is way too broad, but it’s the general umbrella).
I’d guess that the best way to go about picking up the knowledge you desire is to look into domain hosting, where you pay someone to host your site. Read some of the hosting company’s how-tos and help files (e.g., GoDaddy.com support forum; I just searched on “upload” and a wealth of information was returned).
Then, for more specific questions, I think it’d be good to supplement what you find with posting questions here.
Thanks for the replies. Yes, DS, what I’m lacking is knowledge of the technical side. I’ll take your advice and read around GoDaddy. I do have a domain name from there and have a very rudimentary website of my own on the internet (I did it for class), but this is the part I need to learn if I’m going to do more than design sites for people. Thanks.
To me, it seemed like the best thing you could do easily. Not one to be overconfident, I was hoping others would provide some additional ideas.
Oh, that’s excellent! That means you’re not simply relegated to passive consumption of already existing docs, but are totally justified in engaging their tech-support (whatever it may be).
Making sure all your links in your webpages are relative (e.g. images/blah and not c:/images/blah) so that they’ll work when transferred to the new folder structure on your host
Uploading your files to the web host’s “public_html” or “web” directory (or whichever one they tell you).
The website should magically go live on the Internet after that.
In very simple terms, a web server simply waits for a visitor to request a certain file (or your websites’s default home page, normally index.html) and then tries to send them that file if it can find it.
Things get a bit more complicated if you have to deal with access permissions, private folders, databases, etc., but a simple website should be easy to upload. In fact, I bet a lot of web hosts have instructions on how to “publish” your site to them using Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver normally simplifies the task because it understands dependencies and link checking; it’ll try to make sure that you’re uploading everything you need when you publish.
I might suggest going to a public library and checking out a recent book on Dreamweaver development; there’s bound to be a chapter or two about publishing to a webhost. Another good choice is Creative Edge; for $20 a month you can read all the creative tech industry books you want (including Adobe CS5 titles).
You can probably also pay some kid at a local college $10/hour to verify your links for you and upload it all to a web host of your choice. You don’t HAVE to be a designer and a hosting guy unless you want to, though of course it helps to understand everything.
As far as the “maintaining” part goes: learn to install and produce themes for WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Textpattern or any other open source CMS application that you like.
I didn’t understand this at all. Remember: 4-year old. (But thanks.)
The other replies I mostly did understand, and thank you.
I DO want to be the designer. I love that part and I’m competent at that part. Anyway, I’M the “some kid at your local college”… hehe.
When you say “verify links,” do you mean that the links all lead to the right places either within the site or elsewhere on the internet? I do know how to do that. My websites are quite functional; it’s just that my knowledge of the big picture is limited. If you mean something else… I don’t know what you mean.
You might want to a find a job with a company doing web development so you can work with others doing the job and get a wider range of exposure to the business and the technology.
This is a really good idea. However, I’m old and lazy besides being a freelancer in another field (where I make enough $$ to live on while doing something that to me is pretty easy). If I were 40 years younger, I’d do this.
Can I make a suggestion to your learning technique?
If so, make a test site using notepad, and nothing else. It’s a lot easier than it sounds to just dive in and do it. It’s how I learned and it’s a useful skill.
Further when I was learning w3schools was, and still is a very useful reference tool.
Start by making a basic page with a head, title, body and some links. Then add a table. Then maybe a list pretty it up with some css. Further some useful tags to know are div and span.
It’s all pretty simple when you get it, but don’t bite it off all at once.
Those web references are great but I’d also suggest maybe taking a class on web development would be good too. I’m a firm believer in the diving in and just doing it school of learning, but I’m not too vane to see the value I’ve gotten from more rigorous and focused academic study too. Fills in the gaps and makes things more solid, ya know?
Much of the web is now powered by CMSes, or Content Management Systems… the best way I can explain this is perhaps through an analogy: Facebook. Facebook has a very defined look, feel, and user experience that’s designed by the company. However, all the actual CONTENT – pictures, status updates, links, etc. – is provided by the users themselves.
Hence Facebook “manages” the content that users provide.
That’s sort of what these CMSes do for websites: They make it so that people with minimal technical expertise can post new entries (in the case of blogs), new pages, new images, etc. through easy-to-use interfaces that resemble Microsoft Word. They would log in, type up their post, include a few links and images, hit Submit, and then the CMS will take care of all the back-end stuff like making it available to the world, adding it to the archive of old posts, enabling search engines to find it, etc.
That’s a very basic (and imperfect) description, but the point is that it separates content from code, from presentation, from everything.
You, as a designer, can choose to work within a CMS framework by making a theme; essentially, you would be defining how the website looks (and to a lesser extent, functions) but the client would be providing their own content.
Let’s say you design a fully functional website, with the background images, the layout, the headers, the toolbars, etc. But instead of:
You would just provide a theme that works with the CMS and your client would fill in their own content. (Or you could make the initial version for them and leave updates/maintenance up to them). It would still LOOK the same; something like:
You can always team up with a coder friend at college, then.
By verifying links, I meant making sure they still work once the HTML is uploaded to a webhost. A lot of newbie designers make the mistake of linking images directly from their hard drive instead of relative to their home page. If your home page is “index.html” and you have an images folder with your pictures, using the link “images/picture1.jpg” is the correct way; the wrong way would be to use the full “C:\Users\Thelma\My Documents\My Web Sites\Website 1\images\picture1.jpg” path because that folder hierarchy won’t be present on your web host. Anyway, that’s getting ahead of ourselves. From the aforementioned source, read through a few tutorials… it should take no more than a few hours and would give you a much better idea of what it all involves. You can always come back and ask more afterward if you have more specific questions
This is quite important. It used to be that webmasters created distinct web pages as files and uploaded them to their site, often having to edit other files at the same time, to make sure there was a menu link to the new page, etc.
Then there was a generation of web editing software packages that worked in much the same way as a word processor, so you’d add the page in there (on your own computer), then let the software work out what needed to be changed, maintained and re-uploaded. This made it easier to maintain a website, but it put all the eggs in one basket - the master copy of the website existed as a file on a hard drive somewhere, and could effectively only be maintained from one place.
But as Reply says, mostly, this has now changed so that the management of sites happens in software that runs on the web server itself. So to create a new page, the webmaster logs into the admininstration side of the website and can access a range of functions to add and maintain content right there in the browser - as a result, websites can now be maintained by several people at the same time, from more or less anywhere in the world, using more or less any computer, regardless of OS or the software locally installed.
Perhaps one other explanation will be helpful: have you ever edited Wikipedia or any other wiki? Because wikis are really just CMSes–the difference being that usually anyone is allowed to get editing privileges.
Also, speaking of wiki, here’s the Wiki article on the subject.
Also, I will point out that, for small sites that rarely need updated, I still prefer the old fashioned method of getting a webhost with FTP access, uploading all my files there, and then getting a domain to point to the webhost.
I pretty much agree. For, say, a small (or one-man) business website that does little more than describe services and provide contact details, a CMS is probably overkill, because it may require features that inflate the price of hosting.
That said, there are CMS offerings out there that work on flat files, rather than a database, and will run on pretty much any hosting setup. I use one of these myself.
The main problem with developing a static file based website is judging the right point to switch to a CMS, if it’s slowly growing. I waited a bit later than I should with mine, and migrating the content turned out to be a lot of work.
At the moment, I don’t anticipate doing any elaborate websites with databases or anything. For example, my friend the artist is going to want a gallery of some kind (which I do know how to do). I don’t see her uploading new pictures herself because I will need to size and optimize them, and she doesn’t know how to do that. Also I’m sure she won’t want a shopping cart or anything- she’ll want to be in direct communication with interested parties, possibly even by phone, but surely by email at first.
So… when people sell their stuff through etsy.com, is that a CMS?
Sort of. Yes in the sense that it lets somebody else manage the backend and you do the content, but the traditional meaning of CMS is software that lets YOU as a web designer – not Etsy – set it up and customize it for your own client.
Whether something is or is not a CMS is more a question of definition and semantics than anything; you need to examine each individual software (or service, as a lot of them are now) for their own features and ease of use.
The three big ones for general-purpose sites would be Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal. Sometimes there are demo sites set up so you can log in as an admin and see how it works.
Web hosting is dirt-cheap and a full-featured host would only cost $5-$10 / month. Most all of them come with databases now, so don’t let that stop you.
Tell us more about the site you want to make if you want more recommendations.
ETA: I’m going to use this chance to plug Dreamhost if you’re looking for a host. Coupon code “REPLY” makes it cost $26 for the first entire year, domain name included ($9/mo after that). I don’t get anything from this; I just like the company a lot.
