How Do I Make a Website?

One of the best things you can do is have a good book to hand. Most of the O'Reilly stuff is good. I rate "Web Design in a nutshell" as a great reference.

nVu is a freeware download and it's quite good but Frontpage is easier to use and Dreamweaver is the dog's bs. But once you have got the hand of it all you'll mainly be writing it all out longhand as it makes for neater code. You'll still be better off with a webdesign package than notepad as it will colour code all your tags for easy debugging.

Make sure you check for multi browser compatability. If it works on IE and Firefox you have got 99% of your audience.

Build up slowly. Start with pure html, then add a little javascript and start moving all your style statements out of the html tags and into seperate css files. php is a doddle if your are used to other programming languages (C, C+) but you won't need it straight away.

Don't be afraid to use frames and tables. You can achieve the same effects with css when you get going and frames in particular get a right old sl*gging from the community. But they are an easy way to get going.

Have a look at your favourite websites and try and decide why they are so good. Be careful when adding graphics that you don't make the page slow to load. Even with high-speed broadband this is still important.

And have fun.

A site can be implemented just using Notepad, but without modern tools it may be cheap but it is hard work.  Here's one I did in the mid 90's when there were only a few thousand sites in the world.

www.avtech2000.co.uk

Hmmm,

Thanks for all that.  I've had a look, but I'm not totally confident I understand what I'm supposed to do.  Hopefully I'll get there, but if not I might get in touch BNS!  

BNS is very good.  Classy bit of fluff. Nice clean style.  You could do alot worse.  And, you could have a bilingual site if you so desired to attract those big stylee sailing opprtunities in France.  (No I don't owe her money).