Anyone here ever built a website?

[M3CHK1LLA]

a video game/movie store is giving me a shot at making a simple website for them.

also a guy who finds, collects & sells artifacts is wanting me to get his going, link it to ebay & keep it up and running.

never built one before so i was looking for some tips & ideas...

thx in advance!

[Alex6534]

I'm in a course just now doing web design, learning the basics of html and css are pretty simple and can get you going quite well. Will you be hand coding or using authoring software e.g. Dreamweaver? a good place to find some code snippets an get you started is W3Schools Online Web Tutorials
PM me if you need a hand with a particular task

[M3CHK1LLA]

^ thx for the info...i'll chk it out.


anyone else? ideas?

[EtherealEntity]

This is of interest to me as I'm looking to learn too - I only know the very basics.

Must ask though, if you've never built one before and know nothing - how did these opportunities arise? I'd advise letting these companies look for somebody else, though, to avoid wasting their time. I don't mean that rudely at all - but surely it would take a long time to learn from scratch to a professional level?

[Hollowway]

Easiest thing to do is use a WYSIWYG site creation program. Like, if you sign up for Yahoo! web hosting there is a site builder tool that you can literally have a decent site up in a couple of hours. It doesn't do Flash, etc. but it's surprisingly good. I've used that to get something quick and dirty online, and then work on a more sophisticated one later.

[M3CHK1LLA]

Originally Posted by EtherealEntity

This is of interest to me as I'm looking to learn too - I only know the very basics.

Must ask though, if you've never built one before and know nothing - how did these opportunities arise? I'd advise letting these companies look for somebody else, though, to avoid wasting their time. I don't mean that rudely at all - but surely it would take a long time to learn from scratch to a professional level?

doing it as a favor to begin with...i do a lot of computer related design/work & on-line sales so, i figured this would be the next step. once i get things going then there should be some rewards. basically they just want to get things set up to sell and look professional.


thx for the tips so far guys, anyone else?

[JStraitiff]

ive built numerous sites. it was my business for a while. You should start with a free template that has a similar layout to yours and then tweak it to make it exactly what you want. This is what i do for all my sites except usually with my own templates that are easy to work off of. This way you'll have all the style sheets and everything all set up for you already and you'll, specifically as a newer designer, have less confusion when trying to set it all up.

My other biggest piece of advice is never agree to maintain a website unless you are being paid regularly for that work. Anytime you spend time on maintaining the site you should send them an invoice for your time. That is the worst part of the whole thing is when someone messes up something and doesnt tell you what they did and you have to sit there for hours upon hours trying to figure out they updated something or changed some code randomly cause they wanted to reword something.

[Nyx Erebos]

If it's just a website to display stuff it shouldn't be very hard but if it needs to be interactive and to manage a database, it's an incredible amount of work (seriously, building a solid and updatable website is not something trivial).

+1 to create a "standard" template in which you'll add whatever you need.

I hate web courses lol.

[Pav]

In today's day and age building websites is nothing but a matter of time and attention to detail. Don't worry about trying to soak up tons of raw code if you have no experience; just get the latest Adobe Suite, learn to use Photoshop and Dreamweaver and you'll be cranking out impressive-looking sites in no time. I spent years learning HTML only to quickly realize that coding things in pure HTML is, quite simply, an obsolete way of doing it anymore.

[Xaios]

Originally Posted by Pav

In today's day and age building websites is nothing but a matter of time and attention to detail. Don't worry about trying to soak up tons of raw code if you have no experience; just get the latest Adobe Suite, learn to use Photoshop and Dreamweaver and you'll be cranking out impressive-looking sites in no time. I spent years learning HTML only to quickly realize that coding things in pure HTML is, quite simply, an obsolete way of doing it anymore.

Interestingly, I'm the exact opposite. I started out with WYSIWYG editors and, honestly, I hated them. So, I learned HTML and CSS (along with PHP) and never looked back.

In all fairness though, if productivity is a consideration, tweaking a pre-made template is probably the way to go.

Before you commit to anything though, make sure that you know what you're getting into. If they're looking for static webpages with information that rarely changes, you're probably okay. However, if they need dynamic content that will be updated regularly, walk away now and don't look back. If you've got the inclination, you could learn how to control a pre-made CMS such as Joomla or Wordpress, but if you don't already possess that knowledge, don't burden yourself for the sake of doing these guys a favor.

[The Grief Hole]

Wordpress. Easy to use and you can have a site ready in about an hour.

[MFB]

Why not use Dreamweaver? You get to do the layout/design aspect of it and it codes it for you.

[M3CHK1LLA]

well i found out one of the guys was using weebly. his son started it and got the basics going. i learned how to use it and added 3 pages to it and consolidated a couple. i added pics, maps and links to other sites. i had fun doing it but it took a little time. i am getting faster tho. let me know what you think, heres the site...

Contact / Location - www.eliartifacts.com