How to Build a WebsiteThe tools and services you need to create professional webpages are at your fingers tips. In some cases they are free, in other cases, you can pay for real power under the HTML and style sheets. While some of us have blogs and others might have a nice personal webpages, the bread-and-butter of the World Wide Web is the full-blown website. That is, a collection of related webpages filled with data or media content or ecommerce options, all found at the same URL. When you think of the Web, you generally think of it as a collection of millions of websites. If you need one, your options are almost endless. Hire someone to design it and build it, or try your own hand at it. Work with a company that will host the pages, or use a service that builds in the hosting. Use an online service to create pages, or a third-party software tool. Or, if you're truly a gearhead, use a plain text editor to create a site from scratch. How you mix and match depends on your skills, time, budget, and gumption. None of them are wrong, but some can be very right. We're here to give you a very cursory intro to services and software that can get you started on building your own website. Keep in mind, none of these tools will give you a great idea for a website—that's on you. Nor will they make you a Web designer—a job that can be very distinct from building a site. Still, they can soothe some of the headaches that come from a lack of extensive expertise in HTML, CSS, and FTP. Blog as Site When someone needs to build a website quickly without learning or dealing with transferring files via FTP to servers after building them locally on a PC, a blogging service can give you a hurried hand. Our two favorites—Blogger (4.5 stars) and WordPress.com (4.5 stars)—are both PCMag Editors' Choices because they are incredibly easy to set up, customize, and use on a daily basis. Both offer site hosting for you, so you never have to learn FTP tricks; you are usually limited to their design options, however. A blog has become an entity almost separate from a typical website, only because its layout is so familiar; new content sits on the top of the page, scrolling down reveals older posts, and older archived content links off to another page. By adjusting how you use Blogger or WordPress archives items, you can make new webpages for each entry. So, if your site is a catalog of products, then each product is a new entry. In Blogger, you can then enter Settings and say "Show at most 1 post on the main page" and you'll get a new page for each post. Tracking the URL for each is as simple as visiting your blog's "Posts" section to find them; you can then create links to those pages as needed. Best of all, these sites are typically mobile friendly the minute they launch and are usually free, but it may cost you some cash to setup a domain name that works with the site. Website Online Services Using a blog to create a site that isn't really a blog is a bit of a workaround. You can turn to a service like Google Sites (3 stars), but it's a weak offering compared with some of its current website-building competition. They cost a little more to use, but are totally worth the investment. These online-builders are far easier than installing software on a Web server you own, or using local software to design a website that you have to upload to rented server space. Yes, you will lose some of the super-precise control over pages you might have had otherwise, but you'll much more easily be able to create a site suitable for content sharing or ecommerce immediately. With our Editors' Choice, Webs (Fall 2011) (4.5 stars), you can create a site for personal use, business use, or just for your small group. It's free and ad-supported to start, but you can pay monthly fees to lose the ads and get more online storage for pages. There are more than 300 design templates to pick from, with nine page types (like forum, form, and store). You can add content boxes where text or images are placed and edited. Third-party sites can be added to your site as well, so if you've got a shop at CafePress or a blog already, it can become part of your Webs website. With a starting price of $3.75 per month for a 400MB site with a domain name, it's hard to go wrong. Intuit's Homestead (Fall 2011) (4 stars) is not far behind. Two thousand templates mean there's no lack of looks for your future site. It's got more of a small-business focus than Webs (by virtue of its parent company, no doubt) and no long-term free option; there are only 30 days to try it before you pay $4.99 a month for a 25MB site that is limited to five pages. Other options to consider: Weebly, Yola, SnapPages Content Management Systems If you're a larger organization that needs a site with some serious back-end power, you may need a content management system. A CMS tracks all the content you put on a site, from text to video to audio to documents. A CMS can be custom built, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and be more complicated than particle physics. That said, there are also a few out there that are free and pride themselves on staying simple, at least for those with Web publishing experience. Software like Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress (which isn't exactly the same as using WordPress.com) are open-source tools you can install on your own Web server (or rented server space) if it meets all the criteria. You'll need to support technology like PHP, SQL databases, and the like. If those are terms you actively avoid or fear, then you'll want to stay away from a CMS like this. WebSite Creation Software For years, the program Dreamweaver was synonymous with creation of webpages. Now owned by Adobe, Dreamweaver CD6 (4 stars) is our PCMag Editors' Choice because it is, quite simply, the world's most powerful Web editor. It's gone from being a creator of HTML pages in a WYSIWYG interface to being able to handle programming pages in PHP, Cold Fusion, JavaScript, and more. Its liquid layout lets you see how pages will look at different sizes—even on smartphones and tablets—changing a page's look based on the browser or screen size. It's about as code heavy as you want it to be. That said, editors here at PCMag prefer Microsoft Expression Studio 4 Web Professional(4.5 stars) for WYSIWYG offline Web editing. Forget the days of Microsoft FrontPage and its proprietary code to make webpages do flashy things. Expression Web 4 is flexible and straightforward in working with current Web technologies. It doesn't have all of Dreamweaver's extras—it's not for creating pages to work on a mobile device—but, its neck-and-neck in many functions. If you're creating webpages from scratch and want to save a little scratch at the same time, Expression Web 4 should be the first tool you turn to (assuming you have Windows – it's not on the MacOS). The two above programs may assume one thing: that you've got a Web design in place. If that's not the case, or you're afraid of the hard-coding that appears to be part of their interface, consider trying Adobe Muse. It's a unique little program that shares some interface similarities with Expression Web 4 but concentrates much more on letting you design. Templates are handy, embeddable Web fonts are great, and the sitemap view may be the handiest way to get an overall feel for what your site will have. Export it to HTML and you're ready for upload. |
How to Build a Website
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