On Sat, 8 Mar 2003, Brian Christmas wrote: > Sounds stupid, but in 20 odd years of using apple computers I've never > bothered to build my own web page. I thought it would be > straightforward but an hour searching has me stuffed on how to do it > easily (and for bloody free if possible).
Guess you haven't felt the need or desire until now. No problem. You can go basically two routes: code the page yourself, or use a WYSIWYG editor. Your choice will likely be based on how much you want to know about HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language - the code interpreted by the browsers to render the page), and how involved your site is. For coding, get yourself a nice clean plain-text editor. My preference is BBEdit, but there's also a BBEdit Lite which is freeware (?). IIRC it has a great plugin library dedicated to HTML. Do not - repeat, DO NOT - use a conventional word processor like MS Word, etc. It adds an incredible amount of garbage to your file, which means browsers may have problems interpreting it. The problem will rear it's head when you go in to find out why the page doesn't look right. Yuck. Plain-text all the way. I don't have a lot of experience with WYSIWYG editors. I've heard Dream Weaver is very good, as is [?] by Adobe. Front Page apparently doesn't conform in some respects to accepted standards (something about their extensions?). Thank you M$. Some also give you basically drag-and-drop for page layout. The only problem with these programs is that if anything goes wrong and you're unfamiliar with HTML you're stuck. Check out your local libray for books on HTML and on various editors. As well, check out these couple of sites: Doing a Sherlock search on "learning HTML" resulted in: http://www.learninghtml.com/ [beware - many pop-ups] http://www.davesite.com/webstation/html/ [seems friendly] and many others. And don't forget to visit Mecca: http://www.w3.org/ (though it might be overkill at the moment) Piece of advice - take an afternoon and browse the web. Whem you find pages or sites that parallel what you have in mind (and it's a *very* good idea to have an idea of how you want your page and site to look in advance of laying it out) take a look at their coding (view source). Hell - copy it out. Then get BBEdit and play around with a copy of the code. Have fun! Non Illegitimi Carborundum -- G-List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- We have Apple Refurbished Monitors in stock! | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> G-List list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/g-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
