hello everyone I found this site after looking about for help.
Anyway my friend and i set up a little business, its ok steady but we have full time jobs a well.
Now when it comes to websites i don’t have a clue, the first one i did was with webs.com, cost a lot of cash, this was built for friends and is ok for them, beeentertained.com I have not looked after it for about a year, my working partner sorts that out as I get to busy.
The main site is doncasterlaptops.co.uk or soon to be dlsr.co.uk this is what we are trying to do. the site took me a week to do using dreamweaver and CS5. It very basic and i really don’t like it and want to do better. (i need a proper selling page, plus blog and auto links to say facebook and twitter on the stuff that goes into the blog) to get better rankings in google.
I am willing to pay for someone to build us one but not the crazy amounts that i have been offered, we are only starting out and dont have the cash yet. (every penny made has gone back in to the business, just living off our wages from our full time jobs)
I also would like to learn to built sites, just don’t know where to start.
Hope i not made myself sound to silly with this lot.
There’s a saying “Good, Fast, Cheap, pick two”. You’ve picked Good and Cheap
That means you’re willing to either wait for someone to do it slowly or invest the time to learn how to do it yourself.
You want to learn. Great! You’re in the right place. It may mean the equivalent of you working a second full time job, but it’s entirely doable.
It seems you already have a grasp on the basics and are looking to get into the more advanced stuff.
I have never used DreamWeaver, but if you have only worked in design view I’m pretty sure you’ll need to get your hands dirty in code view to do the more advanced stuff, and personally, I think I would only use code view anyway if I didn’t prefer to use a text editor or IDE instead…
IMHO the best way is to break down your goals into manageable chunks and learn as you tackle them.
Hi Mittineague thanks for the reply, I wouldn’t say i grasped the basics as those two i have done have really been ether point and click (web.com) or just thrown together with a mish mash from all over or made up lol.
Time is hard that’s why i could do with help building one, then learn how to do myself over time, this way i can change and edit as time goes by.
dreamweaver was not great, i did find it hard to use, What would you recommend using? Wordpress?
I recommend you start with a good book that lays the foundations for you. Nothing beats that, IMHO. There are many good books around, including those offered by SitePoint. I got my start by sitting down with a good book in the evenings for about a month.
Web pages are comprised of HTML - the “building blocks” - so learning about mark-up is essential no matter what direction you go in.
You can browse through SitePoint’s HTML reference section to get an idea of all the available “pieces”, I agree that a good book is a great idea, and if you’re like me you’ll want to try stuff out too.
Easy enough, all you need is a plain text editor. Type in the mark-up and name the file something.html and open it in a browser.
I imagine you’ll want to look at how to style the pages rather soon in your progress. Again, SitePoint’s CSS reference can help.
One of the first things I used to do - and still often do now, I’m more a developer than a designer - is to give page elements a colored border so I can see where various page elements are, how they fit together, and how my changes affect things.
Whether you decide to use a page builder application, a framework, something like WordPress, or build your own from scratch, the more HTML and CSS you know the better off you’ll be.
One good source that I have found for learning is Codeacademy. They don’t really have too much on Wordpress, but they do have some pretty good HTML and CSS stuff which is always important and best of all IT’S FREE!
There is a key difference to dreamweaver and wordpress that you are missing. Dreamweaver is a “texteditor” and Wordpress is a contentmanagement system. in otherwords the code that runs yoursite in WP is called a theme, it determines the way the data is ouup as the final HTML/CSS which viewers see in the form of a webpage.
WP has many prebuilt templates you can get free/cheap. This mean you would have a working page IMMEDIATELY , FREE and w/o learning much. But of course they wont be the “best code”, may not be talored to what you need , specificaally, and definately wont be unique ( from a point of marketing and targeting customers). But they are ready to go, cheap, and you dont have to much more than typing and basic organizational jargon. Later on, if you learn : HTML, CSS, PHP ( and maybe some .js) you can always tweak and custom the theme yourself using WP ( or even dreamweaver).
Dreamweaver, doesnt manage your content, everything you build is static, and CUSTOM MADE. DW has a WYSIWG editor, but the code it outputs is well , quite poor and sometimes unusable ( or worse… seems usuable but it actually only works on your machine showing potential customes an awfulmess itself). This means you must have at least a modicum of HTML / CSS knowlege to even start using DW and all present and future changes will require time and effort.
It’s always good to start eny endeavors by setting realistic expectations.
As recomended , sitepoint offers GREAT reference sections, as does W3Cschools… which also alow you to experiemnt directly online. Time comsuming, but worth the effort.
Thanks for the Help Phoenix, I have been doing some reading on Wordpress but time is short with a full time job and trying to get our own business up and running.
As i am pushing for time and running out of it as well, I will using a site builder site like jimdo or do you guys know a better site builder site that has an on-line shop within it?.
It’s worth looking at something like Shopify or [URL=“http://goodsie.com/”]Goodsie, which allow you to set up spiffy shopping cart sites in minutes. You just pay a monthly fee, and they do all the hosting and everything.
What you use may vary depending on what sort of site you want and what amount of time you want to spend on it.
For content sites Wordpress is probably as good as anything else, easy to change/add to/edit and so on.
For ecommerce sites, if you have little or no budget you could try an open source solution, OscMax is one of the best with a very helpful support forum
Our budget is min as possible at the moment until works picks up.
But saying that we have around 50+ items for sale at anyone time.
Uk hosting i think will better due to support will be easy to reach and replies will be better and faster. (plus side if phone calls are needed we are calling a uk company)
For your hosting I would suggest a host who offers ‘Live Chat’ to solve basic problems. This would make most of your ‘calls’ free, so location would not be such a big deal. I use a US based host and in 4 years have never needed to call them.
A lot of the smaller hosting companies are only resellers anyhow and they are the ones least likely to offer ‘Live Chat’
As irishman said, a lot of this is done by live chat or help desk email these days anyhow. The only thing I like about local hosting is that uploading is faster … but that’s about it. But if you aren’t doing much of that (and you won’t be, from the sound of it) that won’t matter much.
Anyhow, another option open to you is to have a simple site with Buy Now links to PayPal. If you want to start simple, it’s hard to beat that.
I found this site after looking about for help.