Tech Stuff
In case you're interested
If you're a fledgling organization and have to watch the pennies, we use DotEasy for our webhosting. They offer a no-frills $25/yr hosting service (includes domain name) as you see here. No CGI or PHP - that's $8/month if you need it. But for getting on the air, this looks to be one of the best deals around. And believe us, we looked around. (i.e. we're cheap.)
So far, they've proven to be a reliable host. We update the site and the pages refresh instantly. Support is all by email, but has proven to be timely, answering within 24 hours.
If you decide to go with them, we'd appreciate you using us as a referral. By doing so, we get a little credit toward our domain payment for 2006.
Recommendations on HTML Editors
On the assumption you're a fledging, under funded, understaffed, grassroots organization like us, you're going to have to get by on a shoe string, until you reach some critical mass, where everyone wants on your bandwagon. (Not a great mix of metaphors.) That means you're going to have to start your own web site from scratch with few resources. To that end, here are some recommendations from someone who's already reinvented the wheel.
There are plenty of good, free web editors out there, and we'll recommend them in a moment. We've tried some of them, but still prefer a shareware editor, CoffeeCup. Try the free ones first, and if they work okay for you, then stop. Otherwise, CoffeeCup is $50. It's not perfect, but we like it. It has a lot of clever features to automate multiple web page creation, like "Paste All," where you can paste a new element of code, like a new navigation button, to all your pages at once. (Until we learn PHP, which is real level of automation you need to manage more than 10 or 20 pages.) CoffeeCup also comes with a free FTP client, which is handy for uploading your code to your web host.
You can try CoffeeCup for free for a while, as it's shareware. A lot of this is like trying to pick the "best" college before you've been to college. It's much easier to pick a good college once you've been to college and know what makes a good college.
When we first got into webpage creation, we were looking for a simple solution, along the lines of Macromedia's Dreamweaver WYSIWYG editor. ("What You See Is What You Get") But it's really expensive and WYSIWYG editors don't really work very well. (They tend to use tables.) Besides, CoffeeCup now has a similar WYSIWYG editor. (We disabled it in our installation.)
The sad fact is, you're going to have to teach yourself HTML, and more importantly, you're going to have to teach yourself about Cascading Style Sheets. (CSS) We learned on line from the mostly excellent tutorials found at W3C schools. All the editors mentioned herein try to offer styling of your document, but we're finding that style sheets are quite an art, can often be puzzling, and simple choices you make as you build them can have unforeseen consequences. You're best off creating them by hand. (Whereas you can use the helpful tools in your HTML editor to insert canned HTML code.) Really, style sheets are the way to go and have reduced HTML editing to mostly no-brainer status, which is the way HTML was originally meant to be. If you view our page source, you'll see there's not really a whole lot to our HTML code. It's mostly content, and we let the style sheet do the heavy lifting.
And, oh yeah, there are lots of bugs with Microsoft's Internet Explorer. (Why isn't that a surprise?) You can code your page perfectly and still have it display wrong in IE. We remember the day we simply commented our code, as good do-bees, and had IE blow up over that. "Big John" and Holly have a list of IE bugs. (They don't call it "Internet Exploder" for nothing!)
That said, there are four editors we're aware of, two of which we've tried.
- The first is NVU. There's an extensive on-line User Guide. One thing we especially like about NVU is it's ability to show "blocks." Helps to see what's going on with margins and padding. CoffeeCup does not do this.
- There's also HTML kit, which is like the Swiss Army knife of editors and so somewhat overwhelming in it's array of tools. We tried it for a while, then went back to CoffeeCup.
- We mentioned W3C schools. Turns out they offer an open source browser. We haven't tried it so you're on your own. Let our webmaster know what you think.
- Lastly, we just tripped over this one while researching for this page. Evrsoft's First Page 2006. We don't know why they're offering it for free, but there it is. We tried First Page 2000 a long time ago and didn't find it very useful, but the new version might be worth a try.
Recommendations on CSS tutorials
While you can certainly use a WYSIWYG type web editor, the results, while quick, will not be painless. The underlying code will be fairly terrible, and a real pain in the neck to update, modify or troubleshoot. The reality is, you (or some teenage kid) is going to have to code your web page. That means using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to do it right.
You can try the free CSS tutorials at Selectutorial or W3C schools CSS tutorial
If you need a book, we've found this author to be very knowledgeable. CSS - Max Design
Hey, if we can do it, you can too!
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