Website building help

[Dexter]

Hi all,

Web design is an area I have ZERO experience in. My dad wants me to put together a site for him that will allow him to sell his products. I need info on the following:

Best site with free website templates
What software would you recommend for novices
A brief rundown of the process involved in building, modifying and running it.

Thanks in advance

Dexter

[Games001]

I suggest using MS FrontPage.  Any version after 2000 is fine and VERY simple to use.

You can basically layout a page as you would in Publisher or better yet, when setting up your Control Panel then just hit one button to have all the images, text, links and layout saved for easy upload to your hosting site.

Yahoo has low cost Web Hosting (average about $11-$12 a month for reasomable loading speed, monthly usage, admin pages, email, etc).

As to layout, I have always been told to just look around the web, find something you like as a page, then copy the 'source' code and rework it in your HTML editor (FrontPage?).  It's not considered ok to just repost someone else's work, but you can draw insight from others without pause.

[boykster]

how many products are you talking about?  If it's more than just a few, consider a package like OSCommerce.  Most hosts will support it.  As for hosting, I like 1and1 and you can get setup really inexpensively.  I just setup a non-dedicated website with ftp, 120gigs of storage, a ton of traffic and 2 domain name registrations for $22.00 and that's for 6 months of hosting....

[AtomSmasher]

I used to use www.doteasy.com to host my website because it's basically free, the only cost is the $10 or so a year to renew your domain name.  It only has 100mb of storage and up to 10 email accounts, but there are no banner ads on your website like most free hosting places have.  For my business website I use 1&1 which costs a few dollars a month, but includes a free website builder which makes it very easy to build a website.

[RayB]

Selling goods online is nothing to treat too lightly. There's security considerations. OSCommerce, as cool and easy as it is to set up, can have prices spoofed pretty damn easily.

Front Page?? No. Stay away.

Basically you'll want to look into a pre-made package and then customize it. Some web hosting packages come with E-Commerce options built in.

[Dexter]

Thanks for the advice guys!

[SteveJ34]

I have found www.templatemonster.com helpful in terms of having a lot of options to look through to come up with a look or design ideas.

I have actually purchased a few items over time as a foundation though transforming and adding pieces of art so the end result was not a boilerplate of the beginning.

[rotheblog]

I will echo that statement, stay away from MS Front Page if you are serious about having a website that appears half way professional.  Not to mention, Microsoft has discontinued that product, so don't expect it to get any better than it is now.  Front Page tends to attract really lazy users who never get into the code, so when something breaks, they can't figure out how to fix it.  Plus MS puts all sorts of propriety CSS in the html which is bad in every sense.

Try these products...I have played with both, neither compare to a real editor like Dreamweaver (crashes a lot for some people) and GoLive (Also discontinued with Adobe buying Macromedia).

www.mozilla.org/editor/
www.coffeecup.com/html-editor/

Monster Template is a great website.  The templates if table based can be burdensome if you want to adjust much of anything, but if you find something that you think you can run with as is, don't change the graphics too much, keep the sample insert texts to the same character lengths, then have awesome designs to make you look greater than you may actually be:)

OSCommerce is an industry standard for ecommerce websites, but I haven't used it personally and can't comment on price spoofing.....

Or, I am sure there is a way to use Wordpress to have an online store.  It would probably not be easy, but you would have a free design, with a ton of community designed templates to go with and plenty of information and how to's.