Website Help and such....

animatr

I am about to grad in a few months and believe it or not, our art school does not teach us how to build a wesite. I've bought a few books from the store, and I will say this, code really turns me away from anything. I'm looking for a few solutions as I need to get my official site up and rolling soon. I'm either looking for good books(I have Dreamweaver 8, have no idea how to use it) good sitebuilders that are very very flexible, or hell, I'd even pay someone to get it up and going. I just dont have the time right now to sit down and learn this stuff as I really need to be working on content instead. Please help!
Thanks,
Jeremy

kat

Before you do *anything* you need to think about what you want from the site. These may give you an idea;
- how many images
- any multimedia
- are you going to get some paid hosting (space, domain anem etc.)
- will it be updated regularly
- do you really just want an online CV

Formulate an idea around things like that, always keep it simple and stay away from 'flash' where ever possible as it's actally one of the biggest turn-offs online (although slightly different for 'art' sites).

animatr

ok, I'll clarify. I have the site designed on paper. It will obviously have lots of images, and multimedia as well(imbedded video or something along those lines) and it won't be updated too regularly, maybe once every 2-3 months i suppose. So, it's pretty planned out, and I know what I want, I just have no idea how to get there. I've looked at tutorials but they all start at the intermediate level, and i am a total noob. I haven't done any HTML or any coding (except expressions and such in max) but I tend to avoid coding and math like the plague.
Thanks again,
Jeremy

kat

Just break the site down into distinct sections and build it like that; 'Header', 'Content', 'Footer' a table for each. It'll keep things simple as you work you way through DMW (DreamWeaver). If you don't want the hassle of doing that PM me, and we'll talk.

notman

Starting things simple:
Well, one thing to keep in mind is that your default page should probably be named index.html. Web browsers open the index.html automatically if a page name isn't specified. As an example, when you go to google.com, you'll notice that you don't type in google.com/index.html. The browser automatically knows to look for the index.html when you visit the site.

Remember that everything you type in html, starts with a command surrounded by <>. That command will almost always need a closing command with a </>. So for an image, you would use <B> type in the text you'd want in bold, then close it with </B>.

One thing that doesn't need to be closed, are images... which you'll likely to use the most. The image code would be <img src=" location of your image"> and that's it.

To keep things organized, you'll want to read up on how tables work. They are probably the easiest way to keep things in the right place. A table requires that you start with <table> then for each row you want in the table, you used a <tr> and a <td> for each column in that row. Again, you close each column with a </td> and after you have all the columns you want in that row, you close the row with a </tr>. Once you have all your rows, close the table with a </table>.

Dreamweaver will create most of this stuff for you. I usually use fireworks or frontpage if I use a web creation package, but fireworks is similar to dreamweaver. But most editors are inefficient, so I typically use notepad to write my code and open an editor if I want to have a visual while I adjust it. Especially for creating tables.

Hopefully I didn't lose you through there (I'm tired right now, so I don't know how much sense I'm making). I would take kat up on the offer to get help. HTML is easy once you get the hang of it, but it isn't something you can pick up in one night. It'll take a long time to really master it. So, it's good to have someone to easily contact while you work.

hawken

pay me $400 a day and I'll build it for you

Mark Dygert

Just take the easy cheesy way out and skip learning all that crap you (more than likely) will never use again.

Open photoshop > click, file > automate > Web Photo Gallery.

It makes something like this. Which makes for a good basic portfolio site. I think* you can even find more templates out there with some hunting. Or it might not be that hard to adjust the exsiting template graphics to come up with a more unique look. You can also use Adobe Image ready or even *COUGH* word to make basic HTML sites. Also free hosts like yahoo/geocities offers basic web page creation tools that are easy to use. I used image ready for my site it loads ass slow, takes up a bunch of space but it works for me (very visual, not a code monkey at all) until I am willing to figure out something different.


Whatever you go with, K.I.S.S. it. They will hire you for your work, which is what they want to see, not your spiffy, convoluted webdesign. Let your work speak for your creativity not your catchy flashy site that runs in 20 million pop up windows, man I hate those sites. You're not creating an interactive multi-media extravaganza (as cool as that might sound), you are showing off your work. So let them have at it from the start and keep it coming.

Last but not least READ THIS! Good luck, happy hunting and may your nose not be bloodied by too many doors being slamed on it