Now I have my topic, start creating, right?
If there is one piece of advice that I can give you about creating your own website, this is by far the most important. Before you launch into your masterpiece, you need a clear and detailed plan of what your site is going to look like and how each page is going to lead into each other, believe me, this is going to save you hours of work once you start.
Imagine writing all your content, then getting started, only to find that the format that you imagined completely doesn’t fit in with the information you want to convey – it will be absolutely agonising to have to start all over again.
Grab yourself a bunch of A4 sheets and get drawing, planning each page and how they are going to lead into each other, including spaces for adding site searches, adsense, affiliate banners, headers etc, etc, etc.
Section off each part of the page so you end up with a table, this is how web pages are formatted, something you will learn about as you head into your exploration of html. Anyone who has created a table in word will have a head start, the idea is basically the same.
Plan, replan and plan again to give you a clear idea of how you will format these tables and save yourself literally hundreds of wasted hours later.OK, now I’ve got the basics, what next?
Once you have your beautiful, professional looking template safe and sound on your hard drive, you are going to need software to edit it. Even though all of the design work is done for you, you are still going to need to have a firm grasp of the basics of html to get the editor to do what you want it to.
You can download trial versions of Fireworks and Flash MX – these are remarkable web design programs but, they aren’t cheap.
I recommend opening the document into 1stPage – it’s freeware so you never have to pay to use it. This is how you will replace the information with your own.
First of all, Install 1stPage. Now a word of warning here, upon installation your virus software may alert you to a TrojanBomb attached to one of the files. It is a false virus alert that is well known to Evrsoft. It is NOT a virus. It is simply a JavaScript file that one of the makers must have thought would be funny to include, it causes windows to open continuously until older browsers crash, nothing more. Annoying if invoked, but harmless if not.
If you don’t have virus software, you should. Download AVG antivirus – this is the best antivirus package available for free.
Now that 1stPage is safely installed, file > open the index.html of your template and have a look around, first of all in easy mode, in time you can switch to advanced or hardcore. At the top of the page you will find tabs to switch the template from edit to preview, this way you can find the text you want to replace then preview what it will look like in a browser.
There is lots of advice under the help menu of 1stPage or you can check out this ‘How To Edit Web Page Templates’ tutorial for more info.
Once you have mastered the use of templates in 1stPage you can start to think about creating your own pages with your own graphics. Have a look this Web Style Guide for a complete guide to creating your own web page, do some planning first as believe me, if you have a clear plan it will end up saving you so much time later.
It helps to draw pictures of what it is you want, if you don’t have Photoshop you can go to gimp.org or irfanview.com and download one of the free Graphics Editors there to create all your beautiful headings and buttons.
Webmasters also need to know what their site is going to look like in all browsers so make sure you have the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox and Opera so you can view your site across them.