What is a good program for designing web sites? I am really looking for something pretty cheap (not more than 50-60 dollars), or free. I am a beginner at this so it has to be newbie friendly.
All it is going to be is a Book review site, text mostly, with some pictures of the books, small graphics like stars, and links. I am guessing all this would take is HTML. Of course if I spend money on it, I would like it to be able to be used to write other types of code. Optimially, something with some very handy help files, showing how to write things like C++ or Java, etc. (I am really clueless for the most part of all the prgramming languages needed to design a complex website)
My advice is at this point to skip the programs .
I assume you mean a WYSIWYG (wizzywig - what you see is what you get) editor. HTML is an incredibly easy language to learn. Within about 10 minutes you can learn enough to get a basic site working. The learning curve is probably faster with just learning to code than learning to use a program to make pages.
HTML files can be made using only a text editor, like notepad.
Once you know some HTML you can then decide if you want to use a WYSIWYG editor, and your results will be much better than doing things in the other direction. The W-etc editors do not always interpret things exactly as you want, and you need to be able to go in and tweak the code to achieve the exact result you are looking for.
Most W-etc editors also write “bloated” code, in other words they write the HTML in an overly complicated manner that results in a bigger file size than is needed. This means it takes a longer time for visitors to download your site. Probably not long enough to drive them away, but you don’t know that your most valuable visitor isn’t on a slow modem.
Once you have the HTML basics in hand you can think about automating your site somewhat with ASP, PHP, CGI etc. They are, however, a whole nuther kettle of fish. There are no real tools for “drag-n-dropping” a dynamic site without previous knowledge of back-end-technology. (Back end means in quick-and-dirty terms that the HTML pages are made on the server as people ask for them, like here on the boards).
HTML and Javascript is all you write into web pages. Basic HTML is easy and cheap to learn to do, all you need is any plain text editor such as Notepad (don’t use Wordpad or Word!). Javascript is not-so-easy, but there are tutorials and lots of examples on the web (the Javascript is written into the web page, so if you save the web page, you also save the Javascript too).
You can learn by writing webpages on your own PC and viewing them as is; they don’t have to be posted on the web for you to see what they look like. To upload/download files to your ISP server page, you need an FTP program. There are many free ones on Tucows, don’t pay for one. (FileZilla=open source)
For your stars and such, there’s lots of free clip-art on the web. To produce your own graphics, you need some kind of graphics editor: Paint Shop Pro does probably all you’ll need for (~$100).
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I had PageMill for about three years (hey, it came free with my computer!) and though it did the job of making a basic web page well enough, I found myself constantly editing the HTML it generated. It got to be annoying-- why am I using a WYSIWIG program if I’m going to be tinkering under the hood anyway? I decided I’d be best off just learning HTML and everything else I wanted to do with my site. So I’m going to third the recommendation to just learn HTML on your own.
There are plenty of online tutorials, but if you’re like me and learn better out of a book, run down to your local bookstore or library. I’ve found that the book that works best for me describes each HTML tag, shows an example of the code written out, and shows what that resulting code looks like when displayed on a browser. There are books geared towards newbies, so don’t worry about being intimidated by it all.
Based on your description of the your site’s content, I think you’d be safe learning basic HTML, including tables and CSS ([cascading] style sheets). Don’t worry about adding Java and other types of code yet-- you won’t need any of it yet, if at all. Focus on HTML for now.
If anything, spend the money on an image-editing app. You don’t need a Photoshop-caliber weapon. Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop Elements would be good enough. Personally, I’ve found Web clip art to be lacking somehow, so a graphics app will let you edit what you find to your liking.
I found the most useful resource was a book "Sams Teach Yourself HTML in 24 hours. "
It gives you lessons by the hour and also a “24 hour cafe” website where you can look at the script in your book and see how it translates onto a web page.
I knew nothing about HTML but had a website up and running in less than 3 days.
Another recommendation for the Sam’s guide. As someone who’s fairly confident with HTML I was impressed at its thoroughness, and the attention to detail (e.g. encouraging readers to use XHTML-compatible tags throughout).
Yahoo! Geocities offers two easy, and free, ways for someone to design a page: PageWizards a step-by-step guide
and PageBuilders a more in-depth non-guided page designer.
In my experience, both are good, and all you have to do is sign up for a geocities account.
And since we’re all here: I have a page I am redoing, a large image sliced up. I don’t know the original software used. The palettes are all the same, 256-bit native (not standardized or web-safe). The thing is, the original images use only 30 or so of the 256 palette entries (all the low entries)-- the rest are all black. I can make something that looks basically identical to the old ones, but mine uses up all the palette entries. How does they do that? Can I accomplish the same thing in Paint Shop Pro? I can’t find anywhere that it allows you to select the maximum number of palette entries…?
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IIRC when you export it to a GIF you have the option to customise the colour pallette. This should give you options to reduce the number of colors in the pallette to what you need/want.