Total Noob needs sitebuilding help

Is there a forum or resources for people just starting to get into website building?

While I am intelligent, I have no experience in this. I have no programming, code etc. experience. (ok, long ago, I used to be able to make my Radioshack TRS-80 put my name all over the screen, and blink, and such. that's about it)

Admin TimW told me to post here about it, but I don't know if this is the right place.

I'm so new at this I don't even know where to begin to look for info, and google searches yield too many results to sift through.

Thanks in advance.


Stephi

 

If you are planning to buy a place to park your website, a lot of places offer help in the form of templates. You do not need to know much in the way of coding.

Here is one that says free (but then it is $5/month after the trial).
http://www.homestead.com/

Perhaps you should first be asking what are good web host sites?
Note: I do not have a website; I briefly helped on a website hosted by 1 + 1. 1 + 1 is good BUT extremely difficult to cancel so I can not recommend them for this reason.

 

Relax............ done that? good. Ok, to start off learn some Html, it doesn't take long to learn the basics. if you don't have time for that though, you should probably use a site builder, they might cost some cash, but if you want to make a site and only have twenty minutes to do so, it's your best bet.

 

First, thank you all!!!!

Here it is so far:

www.HerpEden.com

My hosting co is justhost.com. I'm using all open source resources. For example, my shopping cart will be a ZenCart. I used templates express to design the site. I know the WYSIWYG editors would solve all this for me, but I can't drop the big $$$ for a Dreamweaver or comparable product. Actually, there is NO money in the budget right now for any programs, so I'm kind of stuck with open source.

You are right, no code with the templates, but one is stuck with their formatting, I can't figure out how to change certain things with their options (seems not possible), ZenCart I have to use the php to change the front page content, etc.

I'm not a programmer, AT ALL. I am learning very slowly, and am enjoying it. I'd like to learn faster. Poking around the open source supportsite faqs is a slow way to do it. What should I be learning? PHP is similar to C, from what I've read, should I be familiarizing myself with that before dealing with PHP? I won't be coming here every 5 min with questions designed to get you all to do it for me, I just need a good place to start learning about it all. Any specific book recommendations? Any websites that have good basic manuals or ebooks?

Thanks in advance for your replies.

 

I know about the hosting industry and have herd bad reviews about justhost.

If you are looking for a good host I would check out http://www.webhostingtalk.com as there is alot of people with hosting knowledge there.

There is free templates online and free tools. KompoZer I suggest http://kompozer.net/ which is a free HTML editor.

Website wise PHP is for Dynamic web pages like you can build fourms and stuff. Majorgeeks forums is an example of a PHP Script.

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=17921

 

I use Microsoft's Office Live FREE website service. You can find it at: http://smallbusiness.officelive.com/en-us/. I had absolutely no experience with website building and knew nothing about it. It took me about a week to figure out my way around, and put up a pretty impressive website (with pictures and other images) that I'm very proud of. Let us know what you think.

 

Well, I already paid for hosting with justhost. I have to say their support team helped me out within 1/2 hour when I submitted a support ticket. (I screwed something up and they restored my site from their last backup.) So I'm sticking with them for now since they have my money. They have a file manager and FTP and all sorts of links to free programs, from content to project management, to blogs and website templates, to mySQL, zencart, etc.

Thanks for the link to the thread on "which language...". I read that and guess I'll have to hit the library to get a basic, basic, BASIC book on programming. I'll be back when I can ask more educated questions.

Thanks for all your thoughtful replies and for your time!


Stephi

 

Said it on another thread, but figured I'd post here, too, thanks all!

I'm learning from a few books I got at the library, and someday soon, maybe I'll be back with some more complex questions. I'm enjoying learning, and am even preferring the html editor over the wysiwyg one on my sitebuilder!