Starting a website can be an exciting time. You have ideas for the name, features, and a goal for what you want your site to be. Our series for Starting a Website will help take you through the process of planning, creating, managing and all the other aspects of getting your website from an idea to a live site.
Before you jump in to the tutorials, you might want to grab some tools and bookmark some links that can be helpful when making your site.
- Image Manipulation – Gimp (we use for logos, avatars, photo sizing, banners, etc) for Mac, Linux and Windows and FREE
- Text Editor – Notepad++ (Win) or Brackets (Mac) are two freebies. We prefer to use a text editor as things such as Office, OpenOffice and other word processing programs can add hidden codes and mess up your work on your site. If you are doing any HTML or CSS, you really need a text editor.
- Code IDE – Netbeans is what we use for our development needs and it’s free. This is if you really want to get into the code. It’s not necessary for those that don’t need much for coding. We use it on both Mac and Windows.
- FTP program – This is for transferring files from your computer to your server. We use Filezilla for Mac and Windows and it’s also free.
- Learn HTML and CSS and more – We recommend w3schools, codecademy and even Google can help find tutorials for HTML and CSS. With w3schools and codecademy, they really do make it simple to learn how to do things. Grab Netbeans (link above) and use Mamp Pro (very simple) or Xampp and you can even see your changes before you put them on your site. That’s an invaluable tool for developing your site if you so desire.
Below is a list of the Starting a Website series. Feel free to print out the tutorials, bookmark them, and refer your friends to learn as well. Contact us if you need other tutorials or post at our ScriptTechs forum.