How to easily create web pages?

[ReadyOne]

What web page programs (e.g. Dreamweaver, Front Page, etc.) would you recommend for an intermediate level site?

I'm looking for something with a little bit more capability then the old Netscape Composer or the Yahoo/Geocities editor, but I don't need shopping carts, document indexing, or database. Some local scripting (canned wizards?) would be nice. A send mail (feedback) would be nice too.

For example, a user finds a high resolution picture on the local computer and inserts it into the web page. The software generates a thumbnail, links the thumbnail to a copy of the original, and uploads the copy of the original along with the web page.

Automatic page composition would be nice.

Imaging building a web site of stories like Literotica*. The author loads in a big text file and the software splits it over a few pages, adding backwards and forwards links and creating an index page entry. The user then goes through the pages and inserts some illustrations, which will cause the story to expand (automatically, of course) onto another couple of pages.

I'm not sure what all scripting wizards could do, but here's an example. (Any other ideas for wizards? Besides counters?)

The story includes references to toys, and the author selects a toy name and starts a wizard. The wizard turns the name into a hot spot that shows a thumbnail of the item and creates a link to a site which sells the toy.

Another type of site might be one that showcased a construction contractor's work. It might show pictures of houses, remodeled rooms, renovation projects etc. Each example could be several pages or text and pictures.

The examples (or part within them) could be keyworded (e.g. bathroom, kitchen, etc.) and the keywords linked together by some sort of wizard. A visitor sees a picture of a bathroom, clicks a link, and an index of all examples where the builder worked on a bathroom appears.

Another wizard might generate a pop-up window that appears automagically (by hovering or by clicking) which contains details about the example project.

IMHO Front Page is awkward and doesn't make a lot of common things easy to do. I don't remember much about Front Page Express, but it seemed a lot better. The last version of Dreamweaver I used was V3, which was back in the stone age.

What I want is something that a person with enough guts and experience to tackle a newsletter in Word or Publisher could easily use to create and update a site.

Suggestions? Thanks!

* No, I'm not going to do a story site. How could anyone even think of competing with Literotica?

 

[Gangrif]

Finaly, a question i think i might have an answer to.

First, let me say that i dont use an editor, i've designed every page ive ever made using a text editor (you can see my work at http://www.undrground.org:8000/). BUT, i have used a few editors in the interest of learning how to do it without one.

The One editor that i truly liked was Dreamweaver. Its well put together, and it shows you the html tags and such while youre designing the site/page.
It has a lot of automated wizards and such that help you along.
I cant say for sure that it will do exactly what youre asking, (splitting up a story into pages like in your example) but it IS an excellent program.

As for linking keywords to other sites, i cant say ive seen that feature, specifically anyway, in any program ive ever used. However most of them give you the ability to select a word, and turn it into a link. You can of course point the link to wherever you'd like. Might require a little more work on your part, but web design isnt always simple.


I hope ive helped.

 

[done_got_old]

I've used Netscape Composer, Dreamweaver, Microsoft Publisher, FrontPage and HTML using notepad. I use FrontPage with my students because they are familiar with the microsoft platform making it super easy. My own site was done with FrontPage.

 

[Halo_n_horns]

I use FrontPage also. It's a pretty easy program and you don't need to be a technical whiz to get through it. There are better programs, but a lot of those really depend on just how much work you want to put into a site. Frontpage's basics and import options make it really easy to do some pretty creative stuff with minimal time.

 

[Ravin the Poet]

Front Page if you have no idea what your doing
Dreamweaver if you have a very good idea what your doing.


Those are your best two options.


Ravin

 

[ReadyOne]

Thanks for your opinions. Sounds like there are only two survivors left in the market...

Has anyone seen the old Front Page Express recently? Or, is it a dead product?

 

[ReadyOne]

Finaly, a question i think i might have an answer to.
{SNIP}

As for linking keywords to other sites, i cant say ive seen that feature, specifically anyway, in any program ive ever used. However most of them give you the ability to select a word, and turn it into a link. You can of course point the link to wherever you'd like. Might require a little more work on your part, but web design isnt always simple.


I hope ive helped.

Thanks. You have, and I appreciate it.

Of course the wizard can't read the user's mind to get the link, but it could make browsing for the link easy.

For example, when the wizard requests a link, it could let you browse the net, browse your site (and insert a label/target in the page you select), or browse you local machine (like for a picture or file) and then make sure the selected object gets uploaded with the page.

I remember FP would let you do some limited browing to identify an object to which to link, and generate the URL for the link. I don't think it was smart enough to handle anything that couldn't be expressed as "http://"

Personally, I'm a guy who likes to see the HTML/XML. (I was prepherially involved in some of the evolution of IBM's version of troff into GML, and can really work with that sort of stuff). My user doesn't ever want to see any markup, let alone edit it by hand...

 

[ReadyOne]

I've used Netscape Composer, Dreamweaver, Microsoft Publisher, FrontPage and HTML using notepad. I use FrontPage with my students because they are familiar with the microsoft platform making it super easy. My own site was done with FrontPage.

Interestingly enough, Publisher is how this project got started.

The user did a thing in publisher and clicked the "create web page" or whatever button, and got a web page. It turned out to be a .gif (or some such) of what was displayed on the screen in preview mode, and was as big as all out doors. (The "page" was actually just HTML to load the .gif.)

She came to me when her multi-megabyte pages wouldn't load very fast, and when she saw they didn't scale, and looked lousy when printed.

I immediately recognized the problem, but couldn't recommend a better solution than FP to her. She tried FP and found the learning curve too much, relative to publisher, plus she couldn't figure out how to make FP do what she could do in publisher.

Thus I turned to a pool of considerable knowledge about all things in life called the "How To" forum...

 

[Undomiel]

I used the geocities one many years ago but now I despise those things. I just use html in notepad. Its actually pretty easy. The basics anyway. This site explains things in really simple terms, probably cause its for kids, but I still found in very good. In case you feel like doing it the "proper" way.

 

[Ezzy]

You can also get several freebie HTML editor programs from tucows the ones I have used a lot are "ACEhtmlPRO", and "coffeecup" Ace I found I could pick up on much quicker than coffeecup, which is strange because a coffeecup is about the first thing I pickup in the morning (JK).

The syntax checker is effective in ACE, and soon got me scripting html without many errors, I rarely get an error message in the syntax checker now.

For direct linking you need to be aware of the relative positions of the objects (pages/ pictures) to be linked.

Then they can be expressed as ./ or ../ instead of their full http:// address, each . on the ./ takes you up 1 directory level once you have passed the level you are in with your first object.

 

[Ravin the Poet]

You can pay me, and I will do it


Ravin

 

[openminded1972]

Have you considered starting with a web templete...that's where i got my start then i moved into dynamic open source stuff like php nuke and xoops. These are content management suites that you can do most anything you'd want to do.

Good Luck!

 

[Seduce]

I saw once what Frontpage does to a code...... it is a mess and lines and lines and lines of it.

Try to learn html and basic CSS and you will not find yourself at some webmasters forums asking questions like "xxxxx (put here the name of any WYSIWYG editor) has done something to my lovely page HELP"...... as I have seen too often.

Once you get familiar with basics it doesnt really matter what kind of editor you use. Sometimes when I reinstall my PC I am too lazy to install back my favorite editor and I just write into Notepad.

Later on you can do PHP and make some really fine interactive site.

But start with learning html.

 

[Revel_Less]

The nice thing about just using text is that you have total control. Editors tend to put crap in your code that basically says, "This page was made with our product, if you want a page just as cool, buy our product." Now personally, I think that is a fair trade, but it stops being fair and okay when they start throwing this and other crap through out your code. This bloats your file size. While often this is something on the order of a few bytes or kilobytes, but when you compare it to the original source size, it is usually a 100% or more blow up.

If you get good with image maps, then it is easy to mix a left aligned image map (vertical) with text on the right.

Other basic tips:
1. K.I.S.S. Keep it Simple, Stupid. Don't make things more complicated than they have to be.
2. Dark text on Light Background. This is one of the most ignored tips. It is better to have Black on Yellow than Yellow on Black.
3. Don't have autoplaying music/videos. Some people have low bandwidth and/or media issues with their computer. Also, a lot of these files can be rather large, so it can prevent important content from being loaded. Also it is lame to have to reload/restart a song at the beginning because you changed pages. You could use a link pop-up to open a new window that basically only houses the interface for the media in question.
4. Don't go media crazy. Media is more than just audia and video, it is also images. It is very easy to have too many images.
5. Look at professional web pages.

Hope that helps.

-RL

 

[Seduce]

The nice thing about just using text is that you have total control. Editors tend to put crap in your code that basically says, "This page was made with our product, if you want a page just as cool, buy our product." Now personally, I think that is a fair trade, but it stops being fair and okay when they start throwing this and other crap through out your code. This bloats your file size. While often this is something on the order of a few bytes or kilobytes, but when you compare it to the original source size, it is usually a 100% or more blow up.

Exactly

About backgrounds...... it is possible to make nice web page with dark background, but one should take big care of text colour. I.e. black background and white text is not really good - it is hard to read, light grey is much better text colour in that combination.

There is site where you can online check readability of your text, but I lost the link, maybe someone else has it.

And by all means avoid any of those backgrounds made of reapeating little pictures, they are heavy and usually irritating. Just plain colour and as pastel as posibble.

In fact, if you are not sure you are big artist, just reduce colours and images on the page..... less is always better.

Another tip - no fancy fonts...... the best fonts for web are Verdana, Tahoma, Arial..... easy to read (and keep it around 10-12 px). Avoid bold or italics.

Keep it not only simple but the way people are used to. It means try to put your links generally on the left side or above the text (and if page is more than 2 scrolls long put "on the top" link at the bottom of it).
Links should be underlined, you may put mouseover colour changing effect, that is nice touch in my opinion.

And no gadgets of any kind....... I know there are very interesting java scripts out there like mouse trails or falling leaves, but they just take your load time and irritate serious surfers. Dont use animated gifs if you dont have to as well.

Yes, take a look how other people do it, find some good examples, download them and study them...... the best way to learn.

 

[NRG]

When building websites, KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid

If you want to see examples of websites I have built PM me.

Good luck, it's lots of fun.

 

[TBKahuna123]

I don't know about KISS, but you have to anser one question first: Which is more iportant, the flashiness of the site or delivery of the content?

TO create HTML pages I advise staying away from FrontPage. Yes I'm biased, but if you've ever had FP DESTROY 4 weeks of critping work, you'd understand why. Dreamweaver is an excellent program and what I use everyday. It has a good WYSIWYG editor as well as a robust text editor interface for those of us who can code it faster than we can fill out the wizard boxes.

As for automatically creating the various pages, you can either build multiple pages manually, or go with some sort of scripting engine. If you want to shove one big text file in and have the various pages built dynamically, you have to do this with some sort fo scripting engine. PHP is free, but requires the most coding. ASP is free, but made by MS. Cold Fusion is robust and fast to develop, but expensive. If you are just starting out and you'd rather write erotica than design web pages, you should just do straight HTML.

Or hire someone else. And yes, this is what I do for a real job, if you can call it that.