Creating my 1st website from scratch

[LindsayTampaBay]

Doing a first website just for the fun of learning it, and trying to do your own site for your business because you don't want to pay are two completely different things. I hope you're in the first part.

You need: domain (url) and hosting (bandwidth/server space: what allows the site to be "live"). You can get these along with e-mails if necessary from GoDaddy for super cheap. They have amazing customer service support 24/7 as well if you have any trouble. And you can google GoDaddy promo codes to find a ton of deals.

I highly recommend Wordpress. It's a blog site but there are many themes you can purchase that look more like official websites. They have a ton of plugins and widgets as well so you don't have to completely hard code anything unless you want to customize it. So since the bones are in place, you can learn at your own pace and not have to do it all at once. There are lots of great books out there with screenshots for Wordpress. And GoDaddy is very Wordpress friendly (again, they have customer support via phone 24/7).

Good luck! We (my husband and I) have a web design company we started together in 2009 and it's soooo much fun! Lots of work, but we enjoy it.

 

[moke64916]

Doing a first website just for the fun of learning it, and trying to do your own site for your business because you don't want to pay are two completely different things. I hope you're in the first part.

You need: domain (url) and hosting (bandwidth/server space: what allows the site to be "live"). You can get these along with e-mails if necessary from GoDaddy for super cheap. They have amazing customer service support 24/7 as well if you have any trouble. And you can google GoDaddy promo codes to find a ton of deals.

I highly recommend Wordpress. It's a blog site but there are many themes you can purchase that look more like official websites. They have a ton of plugins and widgets as well so you don't have to completely hard code anything unless you want to customize it. So since the bones are in place, you can learn at your own pace and not have to do it all at once. There are lots of great books out there with screenshots for Wordpress. And GoDaddy is very Wordpress friendly (again, they have customer support via phone 24/7).

Good luck! We (my husband and I) have a web design company we started together in 2009 and it's soooo much fun! Lots of work, but we enjoy it.

I'm pretty sure on any blogging platform and including website builders with accessibility to HTML/CSS, you need to meet the specifications of that service you are using, such as Wordpress, blogger, weebly, Etc..

 

[Labtec]

I hate wordpress - and especially debugging peoples wordpress code - because it generates unnecessary tags and you will learn absolutely nothing from generated code because you will interpret that code as standard.

Let's say you bold some text out in a paragraph...I've seen wordpress do this:

<p>some <strong>random</strong> text</p>

Ok, so this will work, but you should never use HTML tags to style your content, you should always do this with CSS.

Instead of the above, I would probably do something similar to:

<p>some <span class='bold'>random</span> text</p>

In your CSS file (assuming you would have an external file) you would put

.bold
{
     font-weight: bold;
}

Depending on how generic you can be, you may not even need that class attribute and could do something similar to:

p > span
{
     font-weight: bold;
}

This will target only the span elements which are DIRECT CHILDREN of the paragraph.

Hope this sheds some light.

You can always add me on Skype as I'm usually developing my own website every night.

I think you will find HTML and CSS easy to learn and understand, when you start getting on to programming, languages like JavaScript or PHP it's a whole different concept of coding and the possibilities are endless!

I remember making my first alert box pop-up, even though it's one of the most simple things to do in JavaScript, I thought I was awesome and it really caught my interest from there on in because I'd always seen these type of alerts but never knew how it was done.

Kind regards,

Lab

 

[Arcayon]

When I first started learning how to make websites I started with html. That is the optimal place to start as some of the asp, php sites are more complicated. Alternatively you could just install word press, but since you are making it from scratch do html. The way I learned was I jumped head first in with a designer program. The one I used and liked a lot was microsoft expression, now we use adobe dreamweaver. Try picking up a trial version to play around with them.

 

[TheUninvited]

I learn from this website and for me is the best you cant learn faster.

30 Days to Learn HTML & CSS - Free Tuts+ Premium Course

 

[spectars]

I would definitely say, start with HTML, it's quite easy and highly functional. Once you get that down, you should decide what you're going for. If you want to create a simple page or a more interactive page.

But HTML should be your starting point, because if that doesn't work out, you should go to websites like Wordpress, Tumblr, Wix.