Can someone educate about making websites please?

[Bozigian]

Hello guys. I have some website ideas that I would like to make come true, trouble is I dont have any knowledge about making websites and I do not know what the different coding are.

I just have dreamweaver 8, I do not know if I should get wordpress even though I believe it is free.

Anyways I want your advice on what to research, what books to read.
What do I need to know to start a forum, or a website about reviewing exotic cars?

And I was looking on starting a business online, selling products online, I just do not want to use a simple web program to do it for me, I want to know how to understand the language of making a website.
Thanks

 

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[bflbob]

My favorite recommendation for learning about building sites is at The Challenge

I've gone through it three times now. Best of all, it's free.

(This used to the called the 30 Day Challenge if you search this site.)

 

[Icy]

What do I need to know to start a forum, or a website about reviewing exotic cars?

You could get by with knowing very little about creating websites to get started with either. Wordpress would be easy setup for a review site, and then for a forum websites like SimpleScripts could help set up one of the free forums like Phpbb easily.

And I was looking on starting a business online, selling products online, I just do not want to use a simple web program to do it for me, I want to know how to understand the language of making a website.

Do the 30 day challenge like Bob reccomended, while just searching google for tutorials about HTML, and CSS. As you get comfortable with them, start learning Javascript as well.

Until you at least semi-comfortable with those I wouldn't worry about learning a server side php, python, ruby on rails, etc.

Also, I know have so many things thrown at you to learn seems overwhelming, but I promise it's not that bad. Just post here if you get caught up on something. Generally, it's just difficult to grasp things because they try to use technical terms to explain an easy concept. At least that was my experience.

 

[JayKim]

The Challenge

http://www.make-a-web-site.com/

Google

 

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[AJ.]

Just go for it.

You should get accustomed to an ftp program (FileZilla, or something like it).
With it, you can upload/download files and directories ("folders") to your website.

Dreamweaver will rock in the beginning.
You can do whatever you want there,
save the html file locally,
then upload that via FileZilla.

You should get hosting, like a 7$/mo one.
Play with that online.

This kind of helps? Ask away... and as others said, Google, the 30 day Challenge...

Oh yeah, and get cracking with IRC (with something like the program mIRC)
Once in there, go to the rooms like #web and #html
Ask politely, and they'll answer everything... and/or redirect you to TFM (manual).
..

 

[jaykla]

This is great and what I was looking for as well. Currently I am in the middle of "the challenge" and it seems to be geared more towards wordpress and review type sites. I am looking more into the "forum" direction. What's the difference between simplescripts and vbulletin? Or are they 2 different things? Is this something I should continue to go at alone or are there people I can contact to help me get this site up, running and profitable?
Thanks
Jay

 

[MJ DeMarco]

What's the difference between simplescripts and vbulletin?

Just different systems of forum platforms.

This site runs vBulletin. Starting a forum is easy -- buy the software, install it on a hosted server, and you're in business. However, I would hardly call a forum "fastlane" -- I don't know many folks who earn big $$ with forums -- but they are great supplements to a brand build (kinda like I use here) -- but a big caveat -- they are big time sucks to get off the ground.

 

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[jaykla]

Hey MJ. Thanks for the feedback. That's exactly what I was wondering about. I spend a lot of time on Teamspeed, 6-speedonline and l-power and other car forums and I see the sponsors they have lined up on the side. Why do you say these ideas are not "fastlane"? I do see them taking time to maintain and keep the content updated but is the ad revenue not worth the time or are we talking mega-volumes of traffic and registered users to make any $$$?
Thanks
Jay

 

[Vyce77]

Hey MJ. Thanks for the feedback. That's exactly what I was wondering about. I spend a lot of time on Teamspeed, 6-speedonline and l-power and other car forums and I see the sponsors they have lined up on the side. Why do you say these ideas are not "fastlane"? I do see them taking time to maintain and keep the content updated but is the ad revenue not worth the time or are we talking mega-volumes of traffic and registered users to make any $$$?
Thanks
Jay

Many times the ad revenue is barely enough to cover server and maintenance costs assuming the forum is not complimentary to your core revenue stream or product

 

[TaxGuy]

Just the thread I was looking for

I'm looking to create a personal webpage(much like WildAmbitions) which will serve a double purpose as a personal blog and testing ground for Wordpress(3.0.1) and Dreamweaver(10.0) for when we start creating commercial purpose sites(namely a business landing page and/or eCommerce). I just installed WP on my Hostgator account, funny since the "5 minute install" seemed a little complicated considering all I need to do was a quick search on HG support to find out I just needed to use the QuickInstall feature on my cPanel instead of editing and uploading the FTP files manually.

On that note, I need to learn CyberDuck as it is the OS X version of FileZilla and for some reason it is not connecting to the FTP account I created on my cPanel

As far as TheChallenge- I know that WPD is a simple one-touch installation, however, I want to know how to do this manually so I can customize my sites and not be limited to the templates/options of WPD, not to mention, only being able to manage 2 sites on their free account or 10 sites for their "special" price of $19/mo

 

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[NewsletterScott]

What do I need to know to start a forum, or a website about reviewing exotic cars?

Here are the steps to take

1) Get a hosting account at one of the big hosting companies...Host Gator, Blue Host, or whatever ones your friends recommend

2) Install a self hosted wordpress blog into the site (Don't use wordpress.com <--you have no control and your site can get deleted if it used for commercial intent)

3) Install the appropriate plugins into the wordpress site that will help you serve your goals. (let me know if you need help with this)

4) Come up with a content strategy on how often you plan on posting, how you want your reviews to look.

5) Create 4-5 really good articles without driving any traffic to them.

6) Create a traffic plan and start driving traffic to them

Some things to keep in mind
-Make sure all actions you take are taken with a purpose, and know what your exit strategy is before starting the site.
-Make sure you know what revenue streams you will create with the site.
-Make sure that you build a targeted focused e-mail list of subscribers. Go and buy aweber or get response to house and manage your list
-Blogging and networking are something that must go together if you want to be successful. After you get up and running go to the other car review blogs and see if you can do a link exchange so your site can build relevant targeted links. Make sure that you make the anchor text the keywords that you want to rank for in google. If you don't know what anchor text means it is the words that are assigned to your link on a website. So for instance say you want your link on another persons website to say "Fast Cars Blog," make sure that the person who links to your site makes the words just like that for the link. (This is going to help your SEO when people put Fast Cars Blog into Google.)

If you need any further help don't hesitate to reach out. It took me a long time to learn how to do all this stuff, but thanks to people who have hearts of gold who taught me over a long period of time, I have nothing to worry about now. I could put this together in my sleep if I had to.

 

[minamo]

In my opinion it really depends on what you want to achieve by it.

If you just want some CMS(Content management system) your good with just learning some basic HTML and the CMS you plan on using.(like wordpress)


However, if your actually interested in learning how to program, i would check out w3schools.They provide nice tutorials,and alot of programming langauges are based on their *w3c* standard.

I would start with HTML and CSS. after you mastered these fairly simple langauges,
PHP and javascript is the way to go for websites.

One last note, if you actually do want to learn how to program, use a program like notepad++ and not dreamweaver. Dreamweaver gets you lazy,and does not learn you alot ^^

Good luck!.

Henk.

 

[TaxGuy]

One last note, if you actually do want to learn how to program, use a program like notepad++ and not dreamweaver. Dreamweaver gets you lazy,and does not learn you alot ^^

DW works though, right? I'm guessing the "makes you lazy" has to do with the viewing option of either Design, Code or Split... thus you can just edit the Design instead of learning the Code behind it or is it something else.

 

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[Icy]

DW works though, right? I'm guessing the "makes you lazy" has to do with the viewing option of either Design, Code or Split... thus you can just edit the Design instead of learning the Code behind it or is it something else.

It 'works', but it'll never be as good as actually coding it. I've heard it's gotten a lot better over the years, but when I used it almost 10 years ago, it put in an obnoxious amount of unecessary code and didn't really follow standards.

I can't comment much, because I haven't used even a fairly recent version, but chances are it still has a lot of hacks to make it display good in browsers. If you depend on the design view, you're gauranteed to run into problems with how it's displayed in older browsers.

That's about all I can say without really trying one of the newer versions.. Just start learning HTML, and CSS and you'll learn it's really not that bad.

 

[TaxGuy]

but when I used it almost 10 years ago, it put in an obnoxious amount of unecessary code and didn't really follow standards.

there's definitely been a lot of changes in coding in the last 10yrs

point taken though that learning HTML and CSS would be a bonus, however, web design is only the marketing side of my business and not the business itself, thus if the need arises for more custom design I could always go to Palmera Tech