Does anyone know how to make and host websites?

[Chowwow]

The title says it all, does anyone have any experience in setting up websites?

I plan on bringing up a website to host some downloads and comics my friends have been making. Problem is, I don't really know how to and I really want to make professional results.

So does anyone know were to start? What things are needed? Does anyone here have their own websites? Should I take classes, or ask squeeks?

[ngsilver]

www.ngsilver.com ^^

I've been doing this stuff since '94.

Really, when it comes to the actual programing, I consider HTML to be much like machine language. I prefer to work on my layouts using a combination of photoshop (considering the majority of professional looking sites employ graphics) and a WYSISYG editor (i use frontpage.) I do edit the html for tweaks and such from time to time as needed, and I heavily use the text programming when I use CCS (cascading style sheets) and PHP.

Personally, you can teach yourself easily. You really don't need a class. I started out by reading a book about building websites. Much of the way I do things is based off of knowledge from back in '94, though I've updated somewhat.

The best resources are the internet. Search for sites with tutorials on html editing. Also, check out lists of html commands and what they do. If you want to get advanced in your design, it will require some fancy graphics editing and sometimes also CSS, since what you can do in HTML is rather limited.

Another good resource is find a site you like the design of, or that does something you think is neat and might want to use. View the source of that page. I learn new things all the time from doing this. A lot of the javascript that i've used in the past have come from grabbing the scripts from other sites. (though i use php mostly now)

In the end, like anything, practice and trial and error is how you get there.

[Chowwow]

Thanks ngsilver. I've been wondering how the guys at Penny Arcade, Mega Tokyo, and One Manga do their things, and it all looks custom made and expensive.

I've been looking at Frontpage over, and I guess I can adapt to it. HTML editing, however, boggles my mind - I have enough trouble reading Spanish and writing in English as it is.

What about free hosts? I heard that they were all crap, but then I heard about Freewebs. What should I do about that?

[ngsilver]

Actually HTML is pretty straight forward. What gets confusing is when CSS is employed, or sometimes complicated tables for layout. Generally HTML is just plain text with formatting tags that do certain things, like the < font > tag which will change the font face and color or the < img > tag that places an image in the page. It just takes some time to get used to it. And again, I consider it the same as machine language so I let frontpage do all of the coding and I just design the page. The reason I use frontpage is that I've been using it for a very long time. I would switch to dreamweaver, since it is a much more powerful tool, but in the end it really isn't necessary since I don't usually incorporate flash into my websites. And if you really want to be cheap Word can be used as an HTML editor as well. Just design your page in word and save it as a web page. Of course your design is going to be limited to what Word is capable of doing, and in the end the HTML that Word spits out is garbled and bloated and un-needed mostly. Which is why I suggest frontpage, since it doesn't bloat the html much and it functions much like Word. You just have to learn the interface and of course how to create things. But in the end frontpage will do everything for you, so you don't have to edit the HTML if you don't want to.

Yeah, many of the big name webcomics paid for their comic archive system and site design. Though with a little time I could whip up a similar program that perhaps would work faster. But of course I know most of the things you need to in order to make it all work. In the end you are only limited to the time you want to spend learning how to do things. Or how hard you are willing to search for an answer. I still refer back to my old html book from time to time, google syntax for certain things in html, read the online PHP and mySQL documentation, and browse forums to find solutions for what I'm wanting to do. The AMV Database System that I'm putting together is a very complicated piece of software that I've been programming from scratch. I'll tell you, morphing user interfaces dependent upon user settings controlled by both the user and administrators is a lot of 'fun' to program. (try downloading the source for PHPbb sometime and look at it)

Well, when it comes to free hosting you get what you pay for. I haven't really heard of any free host that doesn't impose advertising on your site (though I usually incorporate advertising in many of my site designs anyway.) Sadly, I've paid for my website since around 02, so I don't really know what is around when it comes to free hosting anymore. I use godaddy as my host and my domain name comes from a reseller of godaddy (which is silly I know but in the end it's cheaper.) For me, they are a great service. For 3 bucks a month I basically get all the bandwidth I need (I have something like 50 gigs) and I wont run out of disk space anytime soon either (i've got like 5-10 gigs) and of course all the SQL servers I could ever need.

Grant it, to get that price I had to buy 3 years worth up front, which isn't that bad. Around March every three years I pay up for my domain anyway so whats an extra 200 bucks for such awesome hosting? I guess they've altered their plans recently, the Deluxe plan has a lot more available now then it did (and is a little more expensive.) They're reliable and well, since my website is mostly dedicated to hosting and sharing AMVs, it is really nice. The only thing I wish it had more FTP accounts. I'd really like to run an FTP server for my AMV contests that I could automate to give out unique expiring accounts to editors. Though I would need a better job to do that, since I'd have to upgrade to at least a shared server. Though godaddy's shared server accounts are actually the same price as the hosting account I had before I moved to godaddy, and offers me more. Go figure.

[Chowwow]

Hmm, I think I'll try editing things on Frontpage then.

The problem is, I wonder if there is a way to alter those templates into something more refined. There's and editor, for sure, but is there anything else? Does Microsoft have template updates? Can Photoshop help?

[ngsilver]

Technically, all a template is, is a webpage (or document depending on what program you are using) that is either blank or has some direction text in it that has all the formatting saved for you. So actually every aspect of a template can be changed and then saved as another webpage or another template all together.

I think you can download more templates from the web. I don't really ever use them since I prefer to define my own settings based off of the template design I create myself in photoshop.

Though in photoshop all I really do is create the look of the layout of the page, then I take that and code it, split the features up into their object files in photoshop, and pull them all back together.

Basically, take contests.ngsilver.com/, all I did was create that layout in photoshop and then cut the large image up into the smaller pieces and put them each into the layout I coded based off of the full image. Sadly, that kind of editing is actually fairly complicated.