How to create a website for non-web designers

butterbean

I was looking at various places where they have website templates, I have already purchased a domain name, and wanted to know perhaps where to begin, or what people have used in terms of building a website that is very user friendly

Corella

iWeb would be a good option for making a basic site, and is about as user-friendly as you can get. Plus you can host it easily on mobile me, or upload it via ftp to a hosting solution of your choice.

Some great tutorials can be seen at: http://iwebfaq.org/site/iWeb_FAQ.html

butterbean

Thanks Corella I'll take a look!

scitunes

I got tired of being constrained by website editors like iweb, frontpage (go forbid!), etc. and didn't want to remortgage my home to buy dreamweaver so I bought a book by "Head First" on HTML and CSS for about $35 and it made it surprisingly easy to create a website with textedit and a graphics program like photoshop (or pixen or gimp etc.). When I bouhgt the book I knew nothing about web design and I'm still no pro but you can see the results here:

www.sciTunes.com or www.tenspeedtaxi.com

It took a little bit of time but the book made it fun to learn and now I actually understand how websites work which makes troubleshooting way easier than when you depend on a program to do it for you and then it doesn't do it quite the way you wanted.

just a thought.

jonmulcahy

I usually design my own websites, but for my gamesalad games I needed something quick, so I just installed Wordpress and some plugins:

http://www.howihatethenight.com

Was very easy to setup, took less than an hour.

butterbean

Great job on your site scitunes looks awesome!

Mulcahy, yours sounds the easiest in terms of what I need right now, so how did you create yours again? Using wordpress and where did you get the plugins?

Basically, I have a domain-name so can I use wordpress with that domain name to create a site?

Sorry I'm absolutely clueless about web design!

Snowleapord

I use webs mostly. You get forums and blogs ect. It's really awesome!!!
Www.webs.com

davnieli

theres lots out there if u want to make a nice looking one u should try dreamweaver. its made by adobe very good website creator.

foxnett

I used wordpress for my webpage.
Is free and easy to use
www.foxnett.com

SDMG

mulcahy your site looks very good... could you give us some more hints on these plugins?

scorelessmusic

Using wordpress from scratch (like getting it from wordpress.org, then setting it up, setting up the SQL part etc) might be intimidating for most. (Trust me, I did it before ^_^)

For me, I'm fortunate to have a domain name and web-hosting package. I can login via a web 'control panel' and in that control panel is a Fantastico De Luxe feature that does all the installation and arcane stuff for me.

I used it and installed wordpress and then logged into the wordpress installation and added a theme that most suited my needs.

There are many good places to source for wordpress themes. I highly recommend people go to http://smashingmagazine.com and check the Freebies section there. And read the great articles there too!

Using the ImpreZZ theme, I managed to set up my website http://www.apptreats.com in half a day with features like:
- a twitter box that shows my latest tweet
- an iPhone-friendly layout if it detects that you're surfing from an iPhone (or mobile)
--- give it a try, view the site from your desktop and on your phone
--- some of my (heathen) friends surfed from their Android phones and laughed ^_^

jonmulcahy

ok, here is what I did:

bought a domain - I use godaddy, I've been using them for about 8 years now.
got it hosted - I use site5.com, I've been using them for years, but you can use anyone you want.

Install WordPress - site5 uses a neat little utility called Fantastico, most webhosts have it. That installed WordPress automatically for me. WordPress also has pretty easy manual install directions.

Once WordPress was installed, I went about configuring it how I want. Right from the admin page you can search for themes, widgets and plugins. I found a theme I liked and installed it. For the plugins, you just click on the plugins section and then click on Add New. It gives you a search field where you can search for any plugin, read ratings and install. It's very easy.

Contact Form 7 - I used this to create the contact form on my page
Google Analyticator - Allowed me to hook my page into Google Analytics
Really Simple CAPTCHA - Needed by Contact Form 7 to enable the CAPTCHA on the contact form page
Twitter Widget Pro - shows the twitter stuff on the left hand side
WPtouch iPhone Theme - automatically creates a mobile version of the site, visit my page http://www.howihatethenight.com from your iphone to check it out

That's really it. The rest was just going through all the configuration pages to set it up how I wanted.

matthewadavid

I use dot net nuke hosted at PowerDNN.com. Only $20 month. In three hours I had forums, blogs, surveys and more.

jonmulcahy

site5 has hosting plans for as little as $4.95 per month