Help needed: How can I learn to make my own website?

Hello forum members,

Mand my brother have started a small company and we are reselling notebooks and PC's. We have idea's on producing our own line of notebooks and especially tablet PC's.

A friend has made a website for us which looks quite cool. But somehow he is not interested anymore and he doesn't give much attention to the website. The website is empty for 2 months.

Sorry for this long talk but here is the actual question: Where (or how) can I learn how to make/maintain my own website. Let's put it like this: the spine cord is there but I need to finish it with flesh and muscles .

I would really appreciate your wisedom. We are selling lot's of notebooks every week, so I want to be able to update my own website. I want to add images, specs of the notebooks and hopefully (if it is allowed) a link to Notebook Review

Thanks in advance,

Charlie

 

http://boards.gamefaqs.com/gfaqs9/genmessage.php?board=236&topic=21847755

The second post has many links about where to learn how to write in various languages.

 

If you are already "selling lot's of notebooks every week" then you should have funds to hire a new web designer. Such an investment would make more sense to me than trying to learn web design from scratch. The initial expense may seem relatively large but it will pay off in the long run, especially when you are trying to get your business off the ground.

 

Agree with Fred.

However, if you insist on going on your own, before starting on your own, take a look at a CMS. On the left Navigation panel of this site, you can see the various CMS's that you can try. There even are CMS's with full support for ecommerce, credit card and PayPal processing.

A CMS is a full fledged web-app that you can drop in and get started in minutes. Other people have done most of the hard work for you, so there is no need to repeat their mistakes again. ;-) And starting from scratch, everyone will make mistakes.

Working with a CMS is not as much coding as it is system administration. But it helps to know code a little bit. Most CMS's are written in PHP.

To answer your question, try out Joomla, Drupal, osCommerce and ZenCart, then choose one, and hang out in their forums/chat rooms for help. Their web sites also have good documentation and help.

I'm sure can import your existing content into one of these without too much trouble.

 

Excuse me, my english isn't great. With 'lot's of notebooks' I ment 2-3 notebooks and 1-2 desktop's in a week . We have had 'peaks', at those times we were selling 5-6 notebooks and 3-4 desktops with good profit.

I will take a look at those websites. Thanks for the replies. I am not completely a newbie but very new in programming etc.

Charlie

 

I am no master at web design myself, but I'm taking a course at it in school .

The best bet is through a web design software called Dreamweaver (from Macromedia). It lets you design websites "as you see it", instead of in HTML coding where you don't even know how it looks until you press "Save". Dreamweaver can help you add links to buttons you create in Photoshop, or design specific tables and titles. And there are lots of tutorials for Dreamweaver.

 

But...if you are a newbie at Web Design like me...and the website is essential to your business...I suggest you get someone else to do it...a professional. Its worth the investment.

 

For beginnners Antenna software is great. I been using it for years and have created many professional looking sites. The learning curve is about a week of everyday use. You can do almost anything with this software.

http://www.stormdance.net/

 

Guys thank you very much for your input. Especially thanks to Smart Sam, what you mentioned was just what I was looking for. I do not want to encode things but I want to see what I am doing.

Thanks again guys, any comments are appreciated.

Charlie

 

Before you go out and buy Dreamweaver, have a look at a free program called Nvu. Nvu could be called a "poor man's Dreamweaver." Here are some links:

- Wikipedia article on Nvu
- Official Nvu site
- Kompozer, Nvu's unofficial bug-fix release

 

I suggest to Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Ed. (Jennifer Neiderst) to my web design class, since it gives an overall picture. I also believe that you need to dig into XHTML and CSS a bit before playing around with Dreamweaver, if you are going to become proficient in web design. However, Dreamweaver is currently the industry standard for WYSIWYG editors, so you can't really go wrong with it.

 

Guys I am bringing this old thread back. I have more time now to work on webdesign.

I have downloaded the Trial of Dreamweaver (30 days) and I am practicing now. Also downloaded PDF-files that help you while creating a website.

Thanks for info guys. I hope I will be succesfull making my own websites, because a course here (HTML, Flash, Java) can be up to 2500 Euro's!

Charlie