Tips and Tricks

Rapid Recipes for Simple Website Building

Solutions for beginners

By Catalin Bocanu, Web News Editor

10th of June 2008, 16:35 GMT

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In the present days, the creation of a website on a basic level does not require programming or design knowledge. For anyone who wants an Internet presence, but does not know where to begin the process of website building, content publishing and website promotion there are many free rapid solutions.

Online website builders are automatic applications that allow you to create a website by performing a few easy steps guided by a simple to use and understand wizard. Usually, it takes from three to ten minutes to build the website and then it will be automatically online, having a URL corresponding to a free subdomain name.

The free automatic website builders and managers are suitable for beginners, but they could have major disadvantages such as the impossibility to add a custom template, imposed limits to the size of the uploaded files, mandatory ads on the website pages and more.

If you already acquired a domain name with an additional web hosting service, the construction of a custom web presence can be performed using ready-made applications, templates or scripts. Depending on the type of website you want to have online, you must choose the optimal solution.

For a small firm presentation website, a ready-made HTML (CSS) template would be enough to define the navigation system and then to add the content. Supposing that the menu contains the elements "Home", "Products", "About Us" and "Contact", the index.html file of the template must be saved as products.html, about.html and respectively contact.html in the same directory. Before performing this operation, the menu links must be defined in index.html according to their target pages, defined earlier:

CODE

Home
Products
About Us
Contact

The content corresponding to every HTML page contained in the website could be added with the help of a WYSYWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editor or with any other text editor. In case you want to sell products online, a shopping cart functionality must be added to your website. For example, PayPal is a service that will allow you to setup a shopping cart mechanism only by copying and pasting a certain script according to your PayPal account details. There are also other online services providing merchant accounts. They must be selected according to your needs.

For websites having more pages and content, a content management system will be appropriate to handle your website. In this case, you must look for a web hosting service that provides an automatic installer for database driven applications.

The common used content management systems are very friendly and provide an easy to understand web browser based interface. They are also extensively documented and as a consequence, even an inexperienced user will be able to add content to a website.

In conclusion, for the building of a simple website you should only decide its type based on the amount of content and the necessary functionalities. Then, by choosing one of the presented methods, your website will be online in no time.

TAGS:

Templates | Content Management System | Web Development | WYSIWYG | HTML

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