What is the best free program to use to design a website?
I want to design a website and also want to include advertising on the site to help generate an income from it to help provide cash for my overseas visits.
It depends what you want to do and how technical you want to get.
You need to think about the design of your website and that is done either using a graphics program or just plain old fashioned pen and paper. Take a look around some sites – you’ll find a simple design usually looks more professional.
As to creating and editing your site…
There are things called content management systems, which includes WordPress, Mambo, Joomla! – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_content_management_system – which lets non-technical users put together a site very quickly. These programs also depend on having PHP and MySQL installed on the server they run from which may be a problem.
If you’re more interested in learning the underlying HTML, CSS, XML or whatever, then a WYSIWYG editor is a good place to start, FrontPage Express was given away with some versions of Windows and although old may be still useful. – http://www.google.com/search?q=download+frontpage+express
NVU is free http://www.download.com/Nvu/3000-10247_4-10412423.html but is now superceeded by KompoZer – http://kompozer.net/ which produces W3C compliant code.
Ther is also http://www.microsoft.com/express/vwd/ which I like.
These WYSIWYG editors are good in that the split view (the screen shows both the code and the design) shows instantly what changes to the code does to the design.
There’s an ongoing and largely boring debate (as in my browser is better than yours and Linux vs Windows) among developers as to whether you should use WYSIWYG tools or just use a text editor to prodcue the page codes. Once you know a little CSS, JavaScript, HTML then using a text editor can be quicker, but if you’re a beginner you may find it extremely frustrating.
As for the advertising, Googles AdSense seems easiest to use – https://www.google.com/adsense/login/en_US/
I would ALWAYS say WordPress. Can find and download it at http://wordpress.org/
I use it for my own website.
http://www.anime4u.net
It’s very versatile and used for several major online website too including Ebay and Ford!!
Most of all, It’s FREE, open source and easy to install. Most hosting sites now can install it for you in minutes.
It comes with a custom theme and layout but you can download and install via FTP any one of thousands of other layouts to match what you want. Or just create your own.
So easy to use.
References :
Design or develop? Design is graphics – use Gimp. Develop – I use Edit Plus, but Notepad Plus is almost as good, and it’s free. So is Aptana. Mostly, what you need is knowledge not a particular program. If you know what you’re doing you can develop an entire site in Notepad, if you don’t you can’t create a decent site even with Dreamweaver.
References :
It depends what you want to do and how technical you want to get.
You need to think about the design of your website and that is done either using a graphics program or just plain old fashioned pen and paper. Take a look around some sites – you’ll find a simple design usually looks more professional.
As to creating and editing your site…
There are things called content management systems, which includes WordPress, Mambo, Joomla! – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_content_management_system – which lets non-technical users put together a site very quickly. These programs also depend on having PHP and MySQL installed on the server they run from which may be a problem.
If you’re more interested in learning the underlying HTML, CSS, XML or whatever, then a WYSIWYG editor is a good place to start, FrontPage Express was given away with some versions of Windows and although old may be still useful. – http://www.google.com/search?q=download+frontpage+express
NVU is free http://www.download.com/Nvu/3000-10247_4-10412423.html but is now superceeded by KompoZer – http://kompozer.net/ which produces W3C compliant code.
Ther is also http://www.microsoft.com/express/vwd/ which I like.
These WYSIWYG editors are good in that the split view (the screen shows both the code and the design) shows instantly what changes to the code does to the design.
There’s an ongoing and largely boring debate (as in my browser is better than yours and Linux vs Windows) among developers as to whether you should use WYSIWYG tools or just use a text editor to prodcue the page codes. Once you know a little CSS, JavaScript, HTML then using a text editor can be quicker, but if you’re a beginner you may find it extremely frustrating.
As for the advertising, Googles AdSense seems easiest to use – https://www.google.com/adsense/login/en_US/
References :
If you do not know how to hand code HTML/CSS/PHP, etc., then you may need to use a Visual Editor. Both Kompozer and NVU are free. Dreamweaver is VERY expensive. Other alternative is to use Visual Editor supplied by your hosting service.
Ron
References :
Try Blink Web, Wix or Weebly, their easy to manage free website (or blog) has cool features that include drag and drop capability, switch designs on the fly, youtube and google video, custom html, upload images, flikr photo gallery, visitor stats and more. You can also buy a new domain instantly, or host your existing domain for free and make it your own (www.yourown.com)
I hope that I was of some help and answered your question.
References :
http://www.my-linker.com/hop/blinkweb
http://www.weebly.com
http://www.wix.com