Taking the plunge

[KevinBE]

Well I have previously stated that I was not going to have a web presence. Now I have been offered a real good deal from a local hosting company, good friends with my Son, and I can't pass it up. So now I am going to have to learn to create a web page. I hate to admit it but I have no experience with this segment of technology.

My plans are to buy Microsoft Front Page 2002. Is this a good route to take for a beginner with very little spare time?

[Ed_L]

Hi Keven,

I can't answer your question, but I'd like to offer my congratulations. Best of luck with your new venture.

Ed

[KevinBE]

Hi Ed. How's that joke go, last week I couldn't spell Entrepreneur and now I are one. Just hope I'm not moving too fast. So far the learning curve is straight up. Thanks for your well wishes.

[Trimoon]

Hi Keven,

Good luck with your new venture, I think you made a good choice. My web site is up now TRIMOON.COM I've been working on & off for the past two weeks and am still working on it. Living here in Florida, I have an abundance of opportunity for my kind of shots (Nature). Steve

[June Curtice]

Re: Taking the plunge

Originally posted by KevinBE

My plans are to buy Microsoft Front Page 2002. Is this a good route to take for a beginner with very little spare time?

Kevin, I think you'll have no problems at all. Front Page had a deservedly bad rep in the early days but with the newer versions it's become a very choice. I now use it almost exclusively, even for big corporate sites that we develop. It's been easy to teach to clients who want to make minor changes themselves, whereas the learning curve in programs like Dreamweaver were just too intimidating.

I'll be happy to help you in any way, so feel free to contact me.

June

[KevinBE]

Hi Trimoon, thanks for your comments. I really like what you have done on your site. It's very eye appealing and yet to the point. The images are displayed very well. I hope I can do something as well layed out as yours.

Thanks for your input June. I guess I'll just dive in and see if I can swim. If nothing else it should be good experience. I don't know why I have ignored this segment of technology all this time.

[winwintoo]

The voice of experience here....

Hi Kevin,
FrontPage might be a good page generator, but for your first foray into page development, I would recommend that you follow the advice in this tutorial:

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/primers/basics.html

The author recommends using WordPad for your first effort and I agree for the following reasons:

1. If you use FrontPage, you aren't learning the HTML tags and how to use them. When things go wrong (as they surely will) you may not know how to fix them.
2. Page generators such as FrontPage put in some of their own references and code (that's how they keep track of what you're doing) and again when things go wrong, you might inadvertently delete something that's important to them.
3. All that extra "stuff" that FrontPage puts into your HTML documents is more "weight" that you have to worry about downloading.

Once you can build a few basic pages in WordPad, then by all means graduate to FrontPage or whatever - Netscape has "Composer" built right in and it's not a bad page generator, and the best part, it's FREE!

Hope this helps,
Margaret

[Trimoon]

I should say I use NetObjects Fusion 7 for my web page.

Steve

[KevinBE]

Thanks guys, good advice all. Thanks for the link Margaret. That will give me a good start.

Steve, I thought that your page looked a little advanced for Front Page. But hey, I can hope.

Guess I'm going to have to take my Son up on his offer to help. He wants to learn web development and it would be a lot of help if he could at least get the page off the ground until I had time to catch up.

[Doug Nelson]

Frontpage is a wonderful editor. It offers an easy learning curve, and has some advanced features. On the downside, it uses some unique paradigms, so if you ever outgrow it you'll have a harder time than most learning new software.

I used to use Netobjects Fusion, and I still admire it. It's the closest anyone has ever come to a true WYSIWYG web editor. If you've ever used a DTP program like Pagemaker or Quark, you already know how to use Fusion. Unfortunately, once you get into more advanced design it gets a little complicated, but I still wish more programs would work like Fusion.

Dreamweaver is the current cross-company, cross-platform standard editor of choice. It's powerful, extensible, does everything well, and no one will ever giggle at you for using it. Its learning curve is a bit steeper than others, but really not too bad, especially if you've had some experience already.

I use Adobe Golive. It's a bit quirky, but getting better. It has a lot of fanatical supporters, but I'm not one of them. I simply like it because it seamlessly integrates with Photoshop, which saves me so much time on a site like this. It's closer to WYSIWYG than Dreamweaver, but its also not as reliable.

An overlooked editor that I like very much is the free one that comes with Netscape. It doesn't have the most advanced features, but it makes sense to just about everyone the first time they use it, and has no proprietary ways that will need to be unlearned later on.

I do like the idea of practising with a text editor, but IMHO using any of the above in source mode will teach the same lesson more painlessly. You need to know how HTML works, but there is no need to have all the codes memorized and to be able to hand-code from scratch. If there is, I'm in trouble, since I couldn't do it

[KevinBE]

Hi Doug. Thanks for the information. That's a good breakdown on the choices. If I was wanting to enhance my Resume' then Dreamweaver would be the way to go. But right now I simply want to do this one thing and get back to my Photoshop work. I wish I had more time, my company wants me to update my Novell certifications and then get my Cisco certifications. Man, I'm getting too old for all this. Those certifications are a lot of work for me. I'm not sure my heart is in it this time around.

Thanks again Doug, you've given me a lot to think about.

[Vikki]

Congratulations.
I found that basic web page development was pretty easy, once I knew the basics of how html worked. My website isn't elaborate, but it does what I need. I'm not a rocket scientist, so I figure if I can do it, how hard can it be?
I agree with Margaret, and Doug. Once you know what the different tags do, let a program like Front Page do it for you. The more you know, the more control you'll have.

Vikki

[winwintoo]

DOCTYPE

Hi folks, I've been reading about HTML and Javascript and CSS and Perl until my eyes are bleeding but this is the first mention I've come across about the importance of "Doctype" so I thought I'd pass it along in case you might find it useful.

Article about DOCTYPE

I'm working on a web site for my son's business so of course I want to do a good job. Well, all weekend I worked on it and was making no progress - when I read the above article, the lights came on



As with a lot of web pages, I need to use tables to keep things in line (I know there are other ways, but I'm not there yet)

I decided to use one of the "many" web development applications that I have kicking around to mark up the main tables so I wouldn't have to do all that typing - well, I couldn't get those (*^&*^(*%*^&%(^ table to draw properly no matter what I did. Now when I look at the Doctype of the documents that old program produced, I can see why.

I eventually took my own advice and used a text editor and found it worked fine,

Take care, Margaret

[KevinBE]

Thanks Vikki, congratulations maybe premature. I have a ways to go yet. The deeper I get into this project the bigger it gets. I'm going to start taking it slow and easy, I think I was moving too fast. Right now I have more questions than answers. Even when I get the Web page ready I'm not sure I am ready for a Web presence.

Anyway, I've bought Front Page 2002 after fighting with the 30 eval copy for a couple of days. Microsoft has a problem with with the earlier release of FP 2002. It will work just fine with a simple one page document. But as soon as you go to multiple pages it simply crashes. I went to the Microsoft site to see if there was an update but the update wizard said that the update that I needed was already installed. Hmmmm, so I bought a copy at Office Depot and installed it. Same problem! So I go online again to see if I could find some help at their site. Now that I had the retail version installed the update wizard said that I needed an update. I ran the update and the problem was resolved finally. So much for a 30 evaluation!

A couple of years ago after I installed my first Linux server I played with Apachie and HTML for a little while. Of course I forgot most of it because I didin't use it again for a long time. I think I am going to be happy with Front Page. Maybe this will let me concentrate more on Photo retouching and not spend all my time learning HTML and the other things needed to design and maintain my Web page.

Thanks for your input too Margaret.