A Beginners Guide to Designing Your First Website
Part Two
By Dave S.
For some people, designing their first web site from scratch can
be a scary prospect. Here are a few suggestions to make the task a bit less daunting. First of all,
it is important to realize that there are several pieces of software available that can help you
design your entire site without knowing any html at all. These range from freeware and shareware
software, to site builder scripts that are included with hosting packages, to Microsoft FrontPage and
Adobe Dreamweaver. The latter can be quite costly and you almost need to take a course to learn how
to use them.
If you are on a budget, there are plenty of wysiwyg (what you see is what you get)
html editors available for reasonable prices (and some that are free).
They range from useless to some that are quite good.
I have tried out the demo versions of a few of the more affordable shareware, and free site
builders for this article, and a couple that I would recommend having a look at or trying are:
- EZ Generator -
This software appears to have quite a few nice looking templates. It was fairly easy to choose a template
and make changes to the text, and add images to the pages. Reading the help files will definitely help
you make the most of this program.
- Trellian WebPage - Not very user friendly -
especially for beginners, however it is free. Once you have played around with it for a while you can create
a pretty decent page, and it does have some nice features considering it is free.
- CoffeeCup Html Editor - Annoying music
and sounds when you install and start the software. Other than that, this one is not bad - it is quite different
than the previous two editors, but it seems to work well.
Remember that everyone has different preferences and is at different levels of
knowledge when it comes to the web. In addition, each one of these html editors has its own little
quirks so you may have to try a few of these before you find one that you like.
Another option is to find a web host that has a free sitebuilder script included
with the hosting package. The advantage of this is that you don't have to purchase and install
software on your computer - you simply log in to your hosting control panel and create your website
from there. One disadvantage of this is that you can't very well try out a bunch of different hosts
to try the many different site builder scripts available. For those of you who want to go this
route, Wahmmyhost.com offers a $4.99/month hosting
package that comes complete with a nice web site builder script
You should strongly consider learning some basic html as well. I recommend starting
with one of the above options and creating a very basic page. You can then view the html code and get a feel
for what everything does. Do a google search for html tutorials and try a few of them out, and then try making
some simple changes to your existing web page. Learning by doing is the best way to become familiar with
html and web design. Knowing some html will give you more control over the design of your website because you
can use your html knowledge to do things with your site that you could not easily do with the wysiwyg editors.
As you become more and more proficient with html, you will find that you can design an entire web page in
a simple text editor such as notepad. You will also want to find some css tutorials for beginners.
Once you have created and uploaded your web page to your host, you should use
a link checker to check
for broken links on your site. One simple typo is all it takes to have a broken link on your site. You
can find many link checkers on google.
One final tip for now.... often when designing a site, you spend so much time staring at
it that you lose all objectivity and it is hard to tell if it looks good or not. Get a friend or family
member to take a look at your site and see if they have any suggestions. Maybe the fonts are too big or
too small. Maybe it is hard to read, or hard to find important information. Having someone else look at
your site for the first time can be a big help!
Even if you currently know nothing about web design, it is possible for you to create
your own web site. I have seen many professional looking web sites that have been created by beginners.
Having said that, it is not something that will happen overnight. If you are in a hurry to have your web
site up and running you may want to consider hiring a professional for now, while you spend some time
acquiring web design skills. You can put your new skills to work updating your site or creating new ones!
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