Website design help plz

[chippy1970]

Hi all, can anyone help I bought my own website a few months ago as advised by a few people here but since then I have been waiting and waiting for my brother to publish my website but still nothing :x :x

I thought I would have another go at doing it myself, I understand the basics but I want to put a slideshow of my work or photo album on the site whats the best way to do it ?

I tried the basic online website designer that was crap, now I am trying Microsoft Publisher (Office 2007) which I already have I can get the basic design but cannot find an easy way to make a photo album/slideshow.

Any hints and tips are welcome thanks

 

[matt]

I'm fairly certain I posted some links on a thread sometime ago to online photo galleries that can be incorporated in to sites. Basically you do not need to reinvent the wheel - there's pre-built engines to do this sort of thing. When I have more time I'll see if I can find the links again (nudge me via PM if I've not posted something in a couple of days).

 

[chippy1970]

Cheers Matt

 

[Daven]

I use Evrsoft First Page free here

It has some scripts which you can use and is as good if not better than MS Publisher IMO.

HTH

Dave

 

[chippy1970]

thanks Dave I will give it a go.

 

[wizer]

If you are still struggling and want something simple, stylish and cheap, let me know.

 

[BigShot]

Chippy - have you looked into Joomla?
Try http://www.jhost.co.uk/jhost/ to see if you like the way it works - i've had a tinker and it seems reasonably simple.

Joomla is a "content management system" - it makes the pages based on what you want to put up and the template/theme (how it looks) you choose and you only need to worry about what goes on the site (text, pictures and the likes).

Worth a try at least - especially as you can try it for free.

 

[chippy1970]

Cheers Tom and Bigshot,

A friend of mine runs the ticketing computers/software for BA and got someone there to give me a call he sets up sites for people and he's gonna email me over some prices etc. Trouble is I am trying to do it on the cheap as works quiet at the moment so if I can DIY it with a bit of help it would be great.

I will give JOOMLA a go, normally I am a whizz on a PC but none of these website designing programs do what I want :lol:

 

[wizer]

No No No

Joomla is wrong for what you want to do. I take it you want a website similar to BradNaylor? Business website with static content and some sort of gallery or slideshow to display your work. There's no need to use a CMS for this. It's completely overkill. If I was you, I'd take some time and learn how to write HTML and CSS. It won't take you long and you'll forever be in control of your website, for nothing.

A lot of the WYSIWYG web design programmes are completely useless. Unless you want to go for something like DreamWeaver then forget it.

 

[BigShot]

Gotta be said, I'm inclined to agree with Tom to a point.

CMS is overkill for a LOT of websites - but as a DIY thing they "do the job" and if the DIY options you've tried so far haven't worked out it's worth a try.

Building your own from scratch may well do the job and isn't all that hard to do something simple... plus you should be able to do it more efficiently (in terms of the amount of code used to make the page look how you want) than an automated thing (like dreamweaver, joomla and so on) which means a faster loading website.

Personally I'd still look into joomla and see how you find it, if only to get a presence online that isn't just an "under construction" page (speaking of which - don't use "under construction" pages - either the page is complete, up and available, or it's on your computer being worked on. "Under construction" just looks bad - yes, even with the flashing orange lights, "men at work signs" and those yellow and black chevrons.

Of course, learning CSS, HTML and other web-related trickery can naturally lead on to a side income if you so desire.

 

[wizer]

I couldn't imagine building a website with Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress and not knowing basic HTML and CSS.

 

[jlawrence]

I'd agree with Tom 100% on this. A CMS is complete overkill for running this sort of site. Also I'd add that there are often a lot of parts to look after in a CMS and someone most people wanting a business site are unlikely to get around to installing security patches into a CMS.
For a small site there's no reason why it shouldn't come in pretty cheap - certainly less than the cost of a decent editor (Dreamweaver).

If your host doesn't support Frontpage extensions then forget front page - the HTML it creates is abysmal.

I'm sure a quick search on Google would bring up a few options for a slide show - somewhere on webmonkey there'll likely be a half decent tutorial about it.

 

[Tackit]

Can I add that i agree with other points above on this; that a site with CMS is over the top and unnessecary and MS Frontpage is also awful and regarly creates very amatuerish websites.

On the slideshow question I have succesfully and easily used Lightbox in the past and like the look and feel of what you end up with. It is a javascript app so some knowledge would be useful but there are relatively detailed instructions on how to put it together

Cheers

 

[matt]

I could not find the links that I referred to earlier nor can I remember what they were. I knew a geek who wrote a plug-in for Flickr to run a slideshow but can't find details of that either. It will come back to me - it's just a case of when!

In the meantime... have a go with some HTML and CSS - you may surprise yourself.

I see your hosted by Free Virtual Servers which means you have a single MySQL database and supported install of WordPress (check out your control panel). This may be your friend under the circumstances. WordPress is dead simple and you can create pages rather than limit yourself to a blog style. FVS also seem to have a free website builder too - no idea what it's like but no harm in having a play.

UPDATE: Just visited the FVS control panel... Have a rummage in the Scripts section. You have Coppermine in there under Add-ons which is gallery script. You also have Joomla under the One Click Scripts.

 

[Sgian Dubh]

I have been waiting and waiting for my brother to publish my website but still nothing

I thought I would have another go at doing it myself,

I rebuilt my website from scratch about a year ago with Kompozer, which is a free download available here: http://kompozer.net/ It took me about 4 or 5 weeks of intermittently playing around following the built in instructions before I got the gist of it. I'd never done anything like this before and had no knowledge of HTML or anything else regarding website building.

Nowadays I maintain my website using a mixture of mostly Kompozer, but increasingly I find I use Dreamweaver CS3 on a fairly regular basis too; Dreamweaver came with PhotoShop and a bunch of other stuff. I can't help you with slide shows and the like. I wanted a simple to navigate website for visitors without a lot of frills, bells, whistles and whizz-bangery that annoys the hell out of me on many web sites. You'll find a link to my website at the endof this post if you want to see how it looks. I could have made the pages look very different, but the way they are is the way I'd wanted the thing to appear for a good few years before I got round to doing the job myself.

Once I got the knack of Kompozer I built about 5 templates and now I use those templates when I want to add a new page to the website. I can make a reasonably small number of changes to an existing page and have it loaded in half an hour to an hour. A whole new page may take me an hour to half a day, all depending on the complexity of the content. Sometimes it takes me longer to get the images ready in PhotoShop, and prepare the text in MS Word than it does to make a page with those images inserted, along with the text which I add by passing it through MS Notepad to get rid of a lot of the stray formatting that text from MS Word seems to add to web pages. Slainte.

 

[Chris Knight]

I have built several websites using various tools but these days wouldn't bother with any of them even though some of the tools now available make it very easy. Instead, I'd use this service or one like it.

http://www.squarespace.com/

It's not just the initial design and set-up that is a hassle but the ongoing maintenance (and that can include coping with all sorts of stuff over time such as hackers, screwed-up updates and so on). Indeed, I have just about given up on the few sites I still keep for these reasons.

 

[chippy1970]

No No No

Joomla is wrong for what you want to do. I take it you want a website similar to BradNaylor? Business website with static content and some sort of gallery or slideshow to display your work. There's no need to use a CMS for this. It's completely overkill. If I was you, I'd take some time and learn how to write HTML and CSS. It won't take you long and you'll forever be in control of your website, for nothing.

A lot of the WYSIWYG web design programmes are completely useless. Unless you want to go for something like DreamWeaver then forget it.

I downloaded JOOMLA and you have to install it on your server so I didnt bother I went back to using the online website builder that comes with my hosting package which is ok but not great. My brother has Dreamweaver but he lives up in the Midlands so I cant pop round and have a play with it.


Something along these lines is what I am after http://www.oryxdesign.co.uk/Oryx_Design ... _Home.html

I dont know if that will work with my 100Mb hosting package. I just want a homepage with contact details about us page and a gallery.

 

[wizer]

You are not going to get that level of design from a web design package. Certainly not the one from you're host is providing. It just won't happen. It's not that easy. Think about your business. If someone with no experience of building kitchens told you they was going to build one from scratch using stuff from homebase, you'd tell them that the result would be bad to mediocre at best.

Simon used a web developer to get the look he wanted.

 

[chippy1970]

You are not going to get that level of design from a web design package. Certainly not the one from you're host is providing. It just won't happen. It's not that easy. Think about your business. If someone with no experience of building kitchens told you they was going to build one from scratch using stuff from homebase, you'd tell them that the result would be bad to mediocre at best.

Simon used a web developer to get the look he wanted.

Your right I thought I might be dreaming but at least if I can do something that looks ok and is easy to navigate then I will be happy.

EDIT: just got the site up and running have a look see what you think its on the link below this post. I know its not great but I built it with the WYSIWYG program online.

 

[grafter]

you might want to take a look at tumblr blog - i have used it for two sites, its really easy to use supports pictures, audio and video. All the coding is done, you can tweak or just leave it.

Adding content is easy and can even done via email - you can also use your own domain name

best of all its free....


also it support google anayltics - really useful to see how many vistors/ where from etc etc

check it out and take a look at a couple of examples: www.tumblr.com

for photos and sideshows, you might be better with a flickr account and link your site to this - tumblr can do this with ease - you may want to use a lightweight flickr viewer like this: http://ihardlyknowher.com/

there is no real need to throw a load of money at it now - use flickr, tumblr etc and your site will look great

just a couple of thoughts