Website building resources

There are lots of free resources available on the internet that you can use to teach yourself HTML and learn about website design. Most public libraries also have books on these subjects you can borrow if you prefer the written word.

One of the most useful sites around is w3shools.com. This has easy to follow tutorials and articles on just about every aspect of web site development.

Free webpage editors

There are free editors you can use to make the process of web page creation much easier and to keep yourself organised. These are generally of the WYSIWYG type. A good one can be downloaded from NVU.  This has versions for Linux and Mackintosh as well as Windows. Another multi-platform editor is available with the free OpenOffice.org suite of programs.

Alternatively you can use the web page building facility available with most hosting services. These are usually WYSIWYG. You just type in the text and let the editor take care of the coding. Even with these, you will probably find it more efficient to create your text offline using a simple text editor like Notepad, then copy and paste into your webpage later.  ( Don't use a word processing package such as MS Word to create these files).

If you are a Linux user, then QuantaPlus is a full blown web site development package, that usually comes free with whatever Linux distribution you are using. It has lots of advanced features, but its best if you have some experience already.

If you are a masochist you can also use your text editor to create all the html code for your webpages. All you need to do is save the file with a .html extension after the file name when you've finished, then upload it to your website.

Make sure you don't leave any spaces in the file name. For example, naming a page "My first page.html" is not a good idea. Save the page instead as "myfirstpage.html" or "my_first_page.html".

What web site development tool do I use?

Once you get past 5 or 6 pages on a website, maintaining them by hand is very time consuming. If you have more than one website it rapidly becomes a nightmare. For example this site alone has well over 100 pages.

After researching what was available I settled on XSitePro as my website building tool, and its the tool I use most. I've never regretted the initial outlay, its paid for itself many times over.

Its a development package that keeps you well organised, and takes care of such things as Google site maps, contact pages and privacy statements for you. It also automates the uploading of pages for you as one of its features. While its capable of handling some very complex tasks if you want it to, you can still be productive with it almost immediately if you are a complete newbie.

Just to illustrate, when I first added this page to the site, it affected about 27 other pages. I never had to worry about that, all the consequential changes were taken care of by XSitePro.    

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