Make Own Website

I have a pretty long history with making websites.  My first web page was back in 1994.  Mosaic was the browser of choice (the only one).  Netscape Navigator had just come out.  There was no such thing as Internet Explorer.  And people were just happy to have a page up because of the novelty.

Web Page Design at that time was finding the newest coolest thing you could do on a web page and then ..well...flaunting it :)  Blinking text. Animated gifs.  Big fancy flash splash pages. 

Also at that time since there were so few web pages, you just needed to put a page up and it would be found.

These days, web design is an art.  It is some parts graphic design, some parts marketing, and some parts ...well.. putting "ego" aside (because that's a lot of what a website is) and thinking about web user psychology which is a VERY different psychology. 

Finally, learning about marketing, SEO, and internet marketing so that a site is not only created, but it can be found.

I lost some of my clients early on because I didn't know these things. 

So this hubpage is dedicated to web design as we know it today and creating web pages as we know it today - a combinatin of style, usability, and marketing!

I am using this as my first post because I want to talk about Wordpress. I have done just about everything from back-end programming to database design to front end graphics and layout.

These days, Wordpress is just about all I use for most of my clients because it can do just about anything you want. This is one of my early Yahoo Answers "Best Answer" and I like it to illustrate a point.

Someone asked for an easy website to display artwork.

A self-hosted Wordpress has limitless functionality. A popular iPhone motto is "There is an app for that". Meaning whatever you want your phone to do, there is probably an app for that.

With Wordpress, whatever you want your site to do, there is probably a plugin for that.

Now realize plugins are only available on a SELF HOSTED WORDPRESS SITE, not the free one. And there are a ton of great photo gallery plugins for Wordpress.

Enjoy!

Original Question:

I have already bought a domain name, and im in the process of starting my site. Im basically looking for tips, tricks and any other useful information others have used in building their sites. Is it better to hire a professional to build the site? any useful information will help!! Thanks

My Answer (Summary)

Web usability is very important.  Don't sacrifice it for fancy graphics.  Here are some very common errors in web design you don't want to sacrifice

Don't:
poor load time
poor browser compatibility (i.e. too complicated)
slow loading graphics
too many graphics
too many animations
busy distracting backgrounds
poor use of frames
too much advertising
large welcome banners (even your own!)
overuse of java
overuse of any technology for that matter
confusing layout and usability ****

This last one is tricky because even if your site is nice and clean it can still be confusing. As an example, if you go to a bunch of membership sites where you need to register for an account, you'll know what I mean - some of them have very very easy to find "Register" or "Sign up Now" buttons, others are very hard to find. Usually these should be in the upper right. Most "function" buttons (login, logout, register, etc..) are found in the upper right.. Put them somewhere else and users conditioned to see htem in the upper right will be confused. Also, why use "Sign Up" (two words) when "Register" works just as well and lets the user think less.

So in other words, the best way to start a website is to figure out what your users will be using it for .. Then go from there!

Make sure to check the original answer :)

What is the best way to learn CSS?

Or HTML for that matter?

First, I love books.  My favorites are the "For Dummies" series and "Sams 24 Hour" series.  Very well organized, and a nice reference too.  Google can always fill in the blanks.

That being said, when starting to learn, I found one of the easiest ways is to go to a web page, save it to my local computer (complete). This will create a html file on your computer you can edit and then reload back into your browser.  This way you can edit the html, see what the changes look like, etc. 

So instead of designing a page from scratch, you can download an existing one and play with it!

Doing that with cascading style sheets is a bit harder.  You have to download the .css file as well and play with that. 

If you view the source of the html file, it will tell you the source of the .css file.  Download that to your local computer AND THEN change the location of the .css file in your local version of the page to reference the local .css file.

Now you can play with both HTML and CSS!

Full details on my Yahoo Answers "Best Answer"!

I was thinking about learning how to do web designing through books, dvds or software. Does anyone know how could do this and how long it will take. The reason why I want to learn this is because I want to invest in domain names.

If you want to invest in domain names, I'm not sure why you would want to learn web design.

As far as cheap and fast, just learning technical stuff is
http://w3schools.com

You have to know what you want to learn though. I also ended up preferring the structure of a course and a book to give me some direction.

I have tried quite a few and by far my favorite is Web Design Mastery

http://designmyownwebsite.net/web-design-mastery/

I put a snapshot of the ebooks contained on my site and the first one itself "Planning a website" is worth it because she talks nothing about technical stuff and all about designing a site effectively for business and keeping vistors on your page which is good if you are looking to make it into a business.

Finally, if you like dvds/videos, youtube has a lot of people videotaping putting up websites. You can google "build a website" and get tons of hits

Check the original Yahoo Answers here:

I want to learn web designing. Does anyone know what is the cheapest and fastest way to do this?