Building a website - How to...

[shadytree]

I'm just about to start designing a couple of websites, one advertising a business and it's products/services and one for a Photography gallery. I've read up on Dreamweaver 8, know basic HTML and have a good understanding of Photoshop.

So are there any tips or must do's and don't when building a website?

[jaybee]

Try to think like a Marketeer as well as a Designer.

It needs to be search engine friendly, and the text needs to encourage the person browsing to contact the business. There's a lot of lovely looking web-sites that are never viewed.

http://searchenginewatch.com/webmaste is a good start, but some of the stuff needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

Dreamweaver and Photoshop should be more than enough

[smallend]

Shady - YHM

[_dobbo_]

Oooh ooh quick everyone, lets have another CSS vs Dreamweaver fight...

Just kidding! For the commercial one it needs to look professional, and Dreamweaver is probably your fastest route to that end - if you're looking to make a career of it then you'll probably outgrow it.

For the photo one - I assume this is for your own photography? I made the mistake of handcoding my own a couple of years back and regretted it every time I came to have to hand code an update.

Now for galleries I use Jalbum - design your own template and create galleries automatically, easy peasy.

[JonRB]

I know a lot of people knock Dreamweaver (although not as much as they knock FrontPage) but I managed to throw this together with just Dreamweaver and a template I bought.

[ATG]

JonRB said:

I know a lot of people knock Dreamweaver (although not as much as they knock FrontPage) but I managed to throw this together with just Dreamweaver and a template I bought.

err ... uhm ... ?

[judas]

Jon - I'd check your spelling if I were you

[shadytree]

JonRB said:

I know a lot of people knock Dreamweaver (although not as much as they knock FrontPage) but I managed to throw this together with just Dreamweaver and a template I bought.

Good stuff John

A really nice 502 Bad Gateway website

[JonRB]

Oops.

I meant www.coruscant.ltd.uk

[shadytree]

JonRB said:

Oops. I meant www.coruscant.ltd.uk

looks very professional Where did you get the templates from John ?

[jaybee]

Looks good.

Be careful which templates you use, not all validate which can harm your search engine placing.

See http://validator.w3.org/ and

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ for CSS sites.

[JonRB]

shadytree said:

looks very professional Where did you get the templates from John ?

I did a google for Dreamweaver templates and looked at a number of sites and a number of candidate websites. I think I spent several evenings researching before choosing the one I did.

The site I got it from was www.dreamweaver-templates.net but as I said, there are loads of templates around and it just happened to be that the one I liked was at that store.

[jaybee]

www.interspire.com/templates/ have some good free ones that work well in Dreamweaver.

www.templatemonster.com/ have some fantastic looking templates, but avoid the heavy Flash stuff.

[gbbird]

slight hijack, but i too want to get into web design (personal stuff so nothing too fancy)and will be using Dreamweaver. I have the manual, but are there any good idiots guide books available?

[shadytree]

gbbird said:

slight hijack, but i too want to get into web design (personal stuff so nothing too fancy)and will be using Dreamweaver. I have the manual, but are there any good idiots guide books available?

I found Janine Warner's stuff on Dreamweaver 8 very easy to follow. She done the 'Idiots guides to' and some excellent Video tutorials.

www.jcwarner.com

[thepassenger]

I must admit that for my personal stuff I use WordPress & Gallery2, it's quite easy to install assuming that your host has PHP/MySql support.
Wordpress seems to be able to handle being a fairly generic CMS as well as it's obvious blog function.

Just an idea to save you writing your own back end