Web Design Software
Published April 11, 2009 | 
I have to confess … please don’t hate me — I loved FrontPage. I began using FrontPage when it was first owned by Vermeer in the mid-90′s. I have owned every version from that initial version and have recently begun learning Microsoft Expression Web 2. (I had Expression Web 1 on my PC for awhile but never used it.)
I’ve used a lot of different products over the years including NetObjects Fusion and Dreamweaver. I currently use Dreamweaver CS3 for most of my web development, mostly because of its tight integration with Flash, Photoshop and Fireworks. I am hoping to learn the entire Microsoft Expression Studio as I’ve read lots of good reviews and I find the interface comfortable. Continue reading
You can build a web site in 30 minutes
Published April 8, 2009 | For the purpose of this example, we are going to use Google Sites.
Navigate to http://sites.google.com with your browser. You will need a Google account to create a free site. If you use any of Google’s services, such as Google Mail, you already have account. Click on Create site. Continue reading
HTML Editors
Published April 4, 2009 | To view pages published on the World Wide Web you need a web browser. Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari are the most popular. The pages that you see on the Internet have been created by publishers such as yourself using a special markup language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language). This language provides the instructions to the browser on how to display the page.
The simplest form of HTML pages, also called static HTML, can be created by anyone with a text editor. For example, Windows users could use the built-in Windows Notepad application to create web pages. Although you could use this application, there are other HTML editors available which are much easier to use. Notepad2 is a free, lightweight editor that includes syntax highlighting for a number of programming languages including HTML. A more comprehensive editor is Arachnophilia, which is built using Java so that it will work on a number of different operating systems.
Most word processing applications, like Microsoft Word and OpenOffice provide a way to save regular documents as HTML documents but they usually contain a lot of extra code to support the formatting you have used. Continue reading
Getting Started
Published January 10, 2009 | You know you should have a web site but you don’t know where to begin. Or perhaps you have a web site but you know that it looks like a kid built it — well, maybe it looks like an adult did it who didn’t know what they were doing. Lots of today’s kids would do much better. You know what your web site should look like and even what should be on each page. The first thing you need to decide is where your web pages are going to be hosted. While it is possible to host your web site on your PC, it is definitely not something I would recommend. For one thing, when your computer is turned off, no one could get to your web site. There are also security and performance issues. What you need is a web hosting provider. You will also need a web address so people can find you. While you could use something like www.comcast.net/~mcmahon-4/, it is much easier for people to remember www.mcmahon4.com. The first address is an example of what you might get from your Internet Service Provider (ISP). To get the latter you need to register (and pay) with a licensed registrar. (We recommend GoDaddy.com.) Once you have the web site name and a place to put it, you’ll need the tools to create the web site. We’ll compare a variety of web design programs.
- Web hosting
- Web hosting packages
- Finding and registering a domain name
- HTML editors and web site builder tools
- How to build a web site in 30 minutes
- Web design software