OK, all the computer nerds are probably going to shoot at me for this, buuuuuut....How do you actually make a Website of your own...Do all websites make you pay for them???Were do you sign up for one???/Who,what,were,how,why?????? :blink: :unsure: :huh:

Go on HaTcH..answer his question :lol:

You can pay for websites and you can go free...free usually has ads..etc..

Google "free webhosting"

Remember this: DO NOT LINK TO OTHER SITES MEDIA, annndd DO NOT STEAL STUFF!

Stealing is bad, and linking gobbles up bandwith, bandwith is how much your site can be accessed..for example..if I had a 1gb website, with 1gb of bandwith, if it was all viewed, in one view the bandwith would be used up.

If I had a 200 mb website, and it was all viewed 5 times, a bandwith of 1gb would be used up..

eh it's really complicated teaching it to a noob..read some article...why do you want to start on anyway?

Domain names are whole another story...

I went paid..that's why I have so much excess bandwith and space..^^

anzwers.org is a free webhost as is geocities.com

As for making webpages....I write all the HTML by hand so I'm not much help there I'm afraid.

You can probably find How-to guides online or find guides to HTML at a library.

I tryed answerz, it made no sense...0.0

Geocities worked for a while, but I'm going to try it again and see if that works. I need some help with templates...

Answerz or whatever IS confusing, but try Angelfire or Tripod, that should work fine. :ph43r: Geocities is okay too.
I am too poor and too young for a paid website anyways. I can't afford it on my own. :lol:

I remember when Geocities was cool and 5mb was a lot of space for free hosting...I miss that. Like I can talk with how badly I compress my art section, but yeah :p.

I use paid hosting, myself. It's not super expensive, but probably not worth it until you get a site going.

Avoid frontpage and click and drag editors-the resulting code will hurt your BRAIN when you try and learn how to do things yourself. Start simple and work your way up...it's fun. Content is more important than a fancy layout, so long as you can get to it easily.

If you need help with basic HTML/CSS, I might be of some use.

:) I'm a web hosting provider myself... or am working to be. (My server's taking a flight above the ocean right now)

Anyways, NO FRONTPAGE, NO GOLIVE, etc. Learn to code yourself. And better yet, grab a copy of Photoshop and work from there, it helps to see the layout while you're coding it. :)

Photoshop's pricy, though. If you're just looking to mess around, you don't really even need much in the way of graphics. Text-based navigation is king. Loads right away, works in everything.

That said, Photoshop is darn fun with a tablet, though I still prefer GIMP for graphics work.

Har har har...


Easiest thing to do is learn HTML from tutorials such as http://www.davesite.com/ or the ones at http://www.htmlgoodies.com/ Start off simple, do like the hello world thing, modify the fonts and background colors. Then get into using images and links and then on to tables and formatting... Once you feel like you know what you're doing you can start to learn CSS. If you want to see the CSS for Liger's Union, check out http://www.bearcreekfire.com/zoids3d/text.css One sheet... many pages XD (Actually, all my websites use my trademark file name, text.css, which sits in the root directory XD)

Similarly to what DT said, every time I revamped LU, I DREW on a piece of paper what I wanted it to look like.. as a matter of fact, I may still have the original copies.. that would be something to see...

Image editing is pretty straight forward...

Oh, get to know you directory structure (dont keep all the files in one place, spread them out, such as how I keep all the main pages for LU in a directory called home, all the media related stuff in a folder called media... etc... (downloads is downloads/)

Edit the files on your computer, save them as .html or .htm and open them in your browser to view them. Once you are satisfied with how it looks, you can then upload the files to your webspace. This way, you can always edit your pages and it makes life alot easier when it comes to backing up your hard work.

Avoid the easy way out (such as front page or dreamweaver..) you won't learn anything by using programs that do it for you. I personally like to use Wordpad (Notepad uses old fashioned newlines (\cr\lf so it sucks, Wordpad is more universal because it uses the native equivalent to \n)

My favorite thing I learned from HTML was the use of virtual directory structures. Lets imagine that you had a website sitting on your hard drive in like C:\mywebsite\
in that folder you had an index.html {a} file and another directory called C:\mywebsite\foobar\, which contains another index.html {b} file. Ok, so its easy enough to go from a to b, all you do is link like this: <a href="foobar/index.html">. (REMEBER, ALWAYS USE THE FORWARD SLASH IN WEBPROGRAMMING! Your code will work otherwise only in MSIE [just have a look at ElkiLiger's site in IE and then Firefox]) Now what if we wanted to go from b to a? You can't simply do: <a href="C:\mywebsite\index.html">, because a webserver has no idea what the hell C:\ is, right?

Ok, the way you tackle this problem is you tell the browser (through your code) that you want to go up a directory. So you use "../". It has a name but I like to call it an 'escape directory'. Using this, we can write our code as <a href="../index.html"> This will go from b to a.

Now you might ask, well why bother when I can just use my web domain in the href links? <a href="http://www.foo.com/~bar/index.html">B to A</a> <a href="http://www.foo.com/~bar/foobar/index.html">A to B</a>. BAD BAD BAD!!! If you had 50 kajillion pages and they all used that sort of thing to point around you site, if you ever moved domains or webspace, you'd have to change ALL of them!

You can also escape multiple folders back. Take for example this file: http://bearcreekfire.com/zoids3d/media/dvd/ep01/1.html In the nav bar, I have 'virtual' links to the home directory, which is 3 directories back and 1 in. Therefore I use <a href="../../../home/index.html">Main</a> This tells the browser to look up a directory (dvd), up a directory (media), up a directory (zoids3d), and down a directory (home), to find the file index.html. Using this is the best approach to coding your site because it allows you to move freely from webprovider to webprovider while keeping a WORKING COPY of your website on your C: Drive. Its pretty ingeneous.

:lol: Hey, Thanks guys.Im going to do what Hatch says little by little so I can make My own Zoids site....Any body has Zoids Exodus yet???

I disagree, while it is true it may be a easy way out, for beginners and starts it actually helps, I know HTML, I just don't want to use notepad and code all day. Not my style. Rather keep dreamweaver in split mode with the top half with the HTML code and the bottom with the actual editing. I find it helps alot, and dreamweaver is limited so I frequently make code edits and inserts. I find that helps the most.

Go for a host with php..php rocks..the forums uses php too...and use php includes...

But contrary to what A LOT of people believe, browsers can only process and understand HTML. They don't know PHP or CGI, all they know is what they download tells them. If you analyse the output of ANY php script that performs output, it is HTML. Javascript is not necessarily HTML, but is contained in HTML blocks which tell the browser to run an outside program (if its capable of that) to do things.

PHP includes are nice though, but for now I wouldn't trouble him to learn 2 languages!

More advice: Create a basic shell for your website, IE make code that would function solely as a container for the information you want to present. This way for every file you want to create, just make a copy of your template and edit that copy. A good example of a template would be something like this:

<!-- --> is a comment block and is the only universal way to comment HTML.

(oh yeah, the <tbody> tag is completely useless XD. Also, if you read somewhere that you don't need to use </td> tags, don't listen to them.)

More of my advice: While filling up your template, I think its wise to fill it with more <table> objects. This way you can have different numbers of rows in each of the templates <td> tags and be of different sizes. Its a goofy table quirk that when you create cells, they are justified to each other cell by rows and columns. (There are ways to circumvent the problem, but its much easier to just make new tables all together).

I created a table tutorial file once, lets see if I can find it...
Here it is! http://www.bearcreekfire.com/zoids3d/downloads/tables.txt

I'm not an idiot..I know php is a server side processing thing and that browsers don't actually process them.

I remember that tables thing. You gave it to me months ago.

Though should I note that your header

I know it's asking for a mircale if he's to learn XHTML too, but just a reminder, the future W3C specification is to be XHTML, and it's quite difficult and has strict coding rules. Also use CSS, it's useful and it's also in the future specification. Eventually HTML will be replace..obselete!

Casading
Style
Sheets

They should make a book titled: "The fall of HTML"

Good advice ZeRo, but XML strict isn't *horribly* different, it just requires the block leveling of all text (by use of tags like <p>... I HATE THAT TAG!!! XD... and also requires that ALL tags are closed. Usually people dont close tags such as <img> or <br> and this is how XML Strict says it should be: <img /> <br />. Its basically just a big pain in the butt. XHTML really is HTML but its been made extensible /bigword...

By no means was I saying that you are an idiot. I'm just saying that I've had arguments about it with people...

Now is it really necessary to quote the entire post?

*hovers mouse over quote button*

Yea I know, but for me it's pretty difficult, one wrong tag, or one not closed one could spit out errors..it's supposed to promote neatness but noneles..>.<

Also another thing, DO NOT OVERDO IT WITH FRAMES..sure they're purty and all but alot of people overdo it and the page looks horrible. Frames are convient..but I've seen so many people abuse it I kind of recommend against it as a navi bar unless you're doing something that should stay, like say some nice music player on top...I was actually thinking about that one...

Chances are, one of your biggests woes; (what an interesting word) will be layout, don't overdo on flashyness..don't worry about creating nice graphics and everything, start out with solid colors by setting background colors in CSS for tables..it's simple and easy..anybody can do that..

Not sure how much this helps, but try freespaces. No ads. There is also WYSIWYG. I use that a lot. I can upload 5 zoid reviews in less than 15 minutes (gotta give pictures time to upload). View source is your friend too. Templates are a breeze! :)

I love includes.

<!--#include file="top.txt" -->
review here
<!--#include file="bottom.txt" -->

And I'm done! For headers and stuff I just use <h1> <h2> and so on, then style them with CSS. I just need to update most of my Zoid section to match that...

Frames suck, I say. If you can't use includes, use tables and/or divs and HaTcH's ReplaceThis to make updating a whole layout easier.

And you can fix stuff in one place without them, contrary to popular belief. It takes a fix to get it to work in IE, but still. See my Zoids page for an example...that's CSS, no javascript/frames/whatever.

<i>but for me it's pretty difficult, one wrong tag, or one not closed one could spit out errors</i>
That's the point. It doesn't put up with sloppy code like HTML :p.