Friday, September 26, 2008

How to Create Your First Website Without HTML Knowledge

In this article I am not going to teach you how to create top class design. Instead I will show you how to design your first website without any HTML knowledge.

If you have never designed any website before it may sound like difficult job. Don't worry - if you can work with Microsoft Word you can also create easy website. There are two ways how to achieve this goal - the first one is classic HTML coding. The second one is using WYSIWYG editor.

WYSIWYG means What You See Is What You Get. You will be maybe surprised to hear that one of the easiest WYSIWYG editors can be Microsoft Word. You can easily write some text, format it, add some pictures etc. and then instead of saving the document like .doc choose save as HTML. The source code will look extremely unprofessional for every web designer but more important is the fact that it works and everybody can do that.

OK, now you are able to create very easy website and you are probably asking yourself if there is a way how to make better website using similar method. You can download some editor like Front Page. The interface is similar like Microsoft Word but there are many other functions specially designed for web developers. These functions are very intuitive so after a few minutes of testing them you will be able to go to the next level of web designing.

One of very useful functions is switching between WYSIWYG mode and HTML source. When you will become familiar with your WYSIWYG editor you will probably sometimes need to do something what is not possible in WYSIWYG mode. It is the time when you should every time when you change something on the website switch to HTML mode and learn was changed in the HTML code. This way you will be very quickly able to understand basic HTML and make some changes in the source code every time you will want.

The next level can be using some of many online website builders. You can find some easy website builders which can be used for free, sign up for some service offering feature rich builder or go with a web hosting company which offers this feature in its web hosting plan. When you decide for one of these solutions you will pick some of many offered designs, choose color scheme and add text for every page. Then save your work and your web is finished. The advantage of using website builders are professionally looking designs which you will probably never create using WYSIWYG editor. On the other side you must keep in mind that the same design will be used by many other webmasters. So this solution is good for personal or other non-commercial websites.

Another way to your own website are free templates. There are hundreds of free designs which can be downloaded for free as long as you leave the authors link in the footer. When you download your favorite design, open it in your browser, click by right mouse button and use View source option. Now edit the text in the page and when done save it and publish.

Author recommend to your attention http://www.marblehost.com/hosting-plans.php because Marble Host offers 3 affordable web hosting plans with preinstalled php scripts like wordpress.

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