Website

[chef]

what is the best way to create a decent website with only minimal html knowledge - is there an easy way to do this then ?

required - decent website
limitations - minimal knowledge

solution - hire a professional


look at it this way:
"what is the best way to build an amazing luxury house when i've never touched or even seen building equipment? I do own a spade for the odd bit of gardening though"

[cojak]

what is the best way to create a decent website with only minimal html knowledge - is there an easy way to do this then ?

Tiddlywikis are your friend.

And here's a useful tutorial

I spent weeks planning my website, using Nvu and failing to get my CSS templates to work*. It ended up looking an amaturish mess.

I transfered the content of my website to a tiddlywiki and never looked back. I'm not a technical specialist but the site does the job it's supposed to do - pass on information about my company in a clear manner without it looking like a 10-year old's created it.

Boning up on customising my tiddlywiki was easy - not too technical and there's loads of help out there.

*You can't get away from the planning bit though - that's the most important bit of the whole thing.

[Durbs]

The way i write a new site is to totally ignore the HTML/CSS side of things and what it can/cant do in the first instance.

Draw a picture of the site in a graphics package to look exactly how i want it then chop it into bits use that as the basis of the build.

That way the design and layout of the site is not dictated by what can be done via the HTML/CSS. I've got a picture of what it needs to look like and i create the code accordingly not the other way round.

If that makes any sense?

[blacjac]

what is the best way to create a decent website with only minimal html knowledge - is there an easy way to do this then ?

required - decent website
limitations - minimal knowledge

solution - hire a professional


look at it this way:
"what is the best way to build an amazing luxury house when i've never touched or even seen building equipment? I do own a spade for the odd bit of gardening though"

WHS.

Be very carful if you decide to go down the Quark route (draw pretty pictures and then get Quark or some other package to generate the code for you) as what you will probably end up with is an unmaintainable mess of code that breaks your website when you try to add a simple html element...

[Shimano105]

I think that Tiddlywiki stuff is bobbins!

It seems to sort of work (in FireFox) then you click on one link and the menu goes all turdy on you. Then you're stuck in the middle of an unstructured, monolithic page with no way out. Avoid!

[cojak]

It works for me, I've never broken it - still it's a basic website but it does the job.

[Ardesco]

It works for me, I've never broken it - still it's a basic website but it does the job.

link??

[Pondlife]

I used Joomla for mine. Well, I'm in the process of adding the bulltulip content at the mo.

No real html or css knowledge required.

[blacjac]

I used Joomla for mine. Well, I'm in the process of adding the bulltulip content at the mo.

No real html or css knowledge required.

Joomla can be very good for basic websites that fit the mould exactly.

However it can quickly turn into a nightmare for newbies if you want to do something slightly different to the way Joomla does it. I.e. adding a field to a contact form.