I may be putting use to this forum as I am embarking on trying to design a company website for my wife’s starter business. I have purchased, read, and completed the tutorial in “Build Your Own Website The Right Way” which also led me to this website.
I am looking to build a basic website with xhtml and CSS only. Because we expect about half of the website viewers to be looking from the mobile phones we want to limit the flash and java for now. I am sure it will also make it simpler for me.
My thought process was to look online for a template that is similar to what we want and then I can manipulate it. I dont think there is a need for me to reinvent the wheel. I did a couple of searches and a lot of “template” sites popped up. Is it worth it to pay for a template, or should I stick to a free one? Which sites are legitimate for free or purchase templates? Many times when I was looking at the free ones I got popped around from site to site.
I am looking to get the site up and running in a little under 2 months using only my free time and weekends (I am sure this is a longer period of time than most of you can do it in). I am a photoshop novice so I should be able to make some semi-good looking buttons or images with the aide of some online tutorials.
Wish me luck
PS
Can anyone recommend a good free html editor to use. I downloaded Note Tab but I dont like the fact that there are no colored tags
Thanks for the replies everyone. I found those template sites very useful and am in the process of selecting which ones would fit the format of our site that we want. I downloaded Notepad ++ and found it to be very useful.
Martin, I think going free right now is the best option as well. I am not very experience in coding html and css but with a template I can “tinker” and get an understanding of what does what. I am quick to pick up on technical jargon and this shouldn’t be too bad. The hardest part is going to be jazzing it up so it looks professional.
I would say stick to free for now and learn how to customize these templates how extesive is your coding skills with html and css? If you want a simple site and have a firm grip of these codes i suggest going by hand to make things simpler.
Choose your template based on how it looks, but as there are many sources of good quality free templates, you shouldn’t need to buy one…
http://www.freecsstemplates.org/
http://www.opendesigns.org/
http://www.templateworld.com/free_templates.html
should be enough to give you a huge choice of free templates
Since you also want an Editor with syntax highlighting for editing your HTML, well there are loads of Web Editors, for example HTML-Kit see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTML_editors for a brief selection of editors.
It depends upon taste really as to which you use but the feature you wanted is usually referred to as “Syntax/code Highlighting”
Welcome to SitePoint! Notepad++ has syntax highlighting, and is very configurable.