Web site help?

[Rumble]

Originally posted by FactsOfLife


do you think he has about a grand laying around to buy that?

*COUGH*kazaa*COUGH*

[OfficerGoat]

If you have a grand in your budget best bet is to have it done profesionaly. Remember this website is your image to the public. If it looks like ***, you look like *** and folks shop elsewhere. If it loads slow, folks shop elsewhare. You have give or take 14 seconds to capture a browsers attention otherwise they often tend to browse elsewhere. A good profesional webmaster will know to take all of these considerations (And several others) into consideration.

My next point is... how valuable is your time? Plan on dedicating ALOT of time into learning how the web works and how to make your site work for you. Also plan on alot of time (40+hours for a beginer) to put your site together. And then there is general upkeep. That takes time as well. It all really adds up. If your buisiness keeps you buisy then that 1000 spent on a profesional designer/developer can really pay for itself.

That all being said there is no reason you cant do it yourself as well, but don't just be slaping stuff together willy nilly with front page or dreamweaver. Ether are decent choices IF you know what you are doing... and both are poor choices when you dont.

My first word of advice is if you are going to do it yourself then do it because you are interested in learning to make nice profesional pages. Take the time to actualy learn HTML and be able to at the very least do some basic hand coding. Knowing how the basics of HTML works is important, this will save you alot of frustration when it comes down to certian limitations of the language.

Anyhow.. I would say check out www.webmonkey.com they have some great basic tutorials (As well as some significantly more advanced projects as well)

So I guess the end all question is... do you want a nice site that looks good and protrays a quality and profesional image or are you looking to build another www.hampsterdance.com??

[Kevmaster]

Dreamweaver MX runs $200 or so and Photoshop runs $600. Get those two and you are set. They should be available at Best Buys, however a computer store can certainly get them for you.

I would strongly discourage using Front Page as noted above it will cause problems when you go to upload it.

Dreamweaver is the ultimate web design tool. I highly recommend it to anyone.

[flood152]

If you are a beginner frontpage will be completely acceptable for you to use, in fact it will be much easier for you to learn the basics with frontpage. If web design is something you end up enjoying, then I would recommend you look into dreamweaver and fireworks for your graphics. Photoshop is a bit overkill for a beginner. The most important thing when working with frontpage is to make sure that your website host has Frontpage extensions. I too would recommend www.netfirms.com as your host.

[TheDoveDecends]

Certianly DreamWeaver is much better software to use for those who know what their doing.

Bust i must say, for a beginner FrontPage is going to be much more understandable.

As for webhosting, Depending on what you want (space, bandwidth, etc) id recommened: www.mysitespace.com and www.hostdime.com Ive used both, and they are both pretty good companies. (Ive been in the webhosting business for awhile, and Owned my own hosting business as well)

I would also look at www.webhostxl.com , Ive never used them, but they have some great deals.

You may want to shop around a bit, theres always deals lurking out there.

Good Luck

[jdev]

Originally posted by dyst0pia
AHHHHHH!!!!

The first rule of web design is:

1.) You are not allowed to use frontpage.

Macromedia Dreamweaver...'nuff said.

I am being serious too. If you use frontpage to do certain things, some hosting companies won't be able to support it. Also, frontpage has a habit of messing stuff up so it won't really look like what frontpage says it looks like.

Macromedia all the way.

I would just get StudioMX so that you get everything.

what he said. i work at a webhosting company where people use dreamweaver to design a website and think its the sheet. its horrible. not to mention permissions for usability, the extensions you have to enable and setup on the server.. the ease of hacking a frontpage web... geesh. just stick with dreamweaver.