Creating & Building Your Website II

Using A Word Processor or Graphic Software:    

MSWord or Publisher and such programs are the easiest to use to create a web page or site. Remember that a web page is an electronic document;  MSWord and such document creating softwares are perfectly capable of helping you design your own website, in fact most of them even have basic templates to get you started.

MSPublisher has a step by step method of helping you create an design your website, which is very useful and easy. It too has great many ready made templates to choose from, which can also be modified to fit your needs. Once you are able to create your website using this method, your next step is to upload it to your host.

This method has it's limitations and is cumbersome with certain intricate web designing tasks. For simple web page or website this is a nice method to get you introduced and started to the web world. It is also a good way to get a feel of designing and understanding website layout, colours, planning etc. in the long run though this is not a method I would choose.

Use Ready Made Templates:

After having made my first site using the hosting sites templates, I wanted a more creative site of my choosing and so this was the second method I used to get my original site upgraded.

I went out and purchased a ready made website template. Using FrontPage as my editing software, I modified the images and gathered and updated all my web information on this new template and then uploaded it to my hosting site. I still was not very comfortable with using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program to upload my website, so I used the FrontPage program and my hosting sites ability to upload my site. It was pretty easy after a few tries and phone calls to my hosting site support staff who were very helpful.

This gave me a lot of satisfaction as I achieved several things in this one move; I chose a design from thousands that worked well for my business, I learnt and used a new software to modify the template and I uploaded my finished site to the host. It felt really good. I also saved some money in the long run since I only paid a one time fee for my template and my hosting cost was less as I no longer needed the hosting sites templates.

This is a great option for those who know how to use FrontPage or Dreamweaver or  CoffeCup HTML editing software. This choice allows you to select from literally thousands of beautifully pre designed, colour coordinated and laid out templates without you having to spend hours doing it. For only a few dollars you get a great looking site.

A tiny drawback is that others can buy the same template too, but with billions of sites on the web I highly doubt if you will come across two sites that look identical. I know I haven't, not yet.

Using FrontPage or DreamWeaver or an HTML Editor:

Although no longer being sold; FrontPage was a Microsoft product that became one of the most widely used website designing software. It was reasonably priced, easy to use and almost all host sites allowed sites created in FrontPage to be uploaded directly to the host without much difficulty (they called it FrontPage Extension).

This was the second method I used for my websites. Many hosting companies now do not support FrontPage Extension as there are security flaws in the program and they create a nightmare for the host sites. There maybe a few host sites who may still support it.

You can still use the software to design your site, but you will need to use FTP to upload it. Although no new versions are available for sell, you can still create a pretty good site with this software.

Dreamweaver is in my opinion the most widely used software for web design and creation, currently. It is exteremly powerful and will allow you to build a great looking site. It has a slightly higher learning curve but then it is worth it if website design is your profession or passion.

I have used Dreamweaver and FrontPage at different times, initially I favoured FP since it was slightly easier to use, but as I gained bit more knowledge I started to appreciate Dreamweaver more. It is a more complete package, it comes with a few templates to get you started and has many features to make your website building fun and interesting. The drawback; cost of the software and the learning curve. If web creating and design were my full time profession then this certainly i the software I would buy and use.

A more economical choice is to use CoffeCup HTML as your HTML editor. This company has a fantastic selection of webtools that will help you create, design, maintain a great website, including flash tools etc. All their software is easy to use and exteremly well priced.

I would visit CoffeCup and look at all their web tools to keep all your options open and perhaps download some of their free stuff. I have used some of their software snippets to complete certain web projects with great success.   

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