David Henson,

My avatar is a picture of me, but I'm not an art teacher. As for everything you said since you asked that question: WTF? Mellestad made one small joke and it seems to have thumped your skull and damaged your brain. This recent writing style of yours reminds me of that one episode of House where the patient had banged his head against the desk and then thought he was communicating when he talked but everyone else disagreed.

I do not have a beard in that picture and I do not have one now. That dark region by my ear: that's a shadow; and the peach region around my chin: that's my chin.

 Well David, I will agree with you that everyone should know at least the basics of HTML. In the modern world, it should be viewed as an important enough skill that it should be taught in grade school, probably in between basic geometry and introductory algebra. Really, it is that important to living in an online world. That and VB code but if you can handle HTML, then VB code is a walk in the park.

 

I have done a bunch of websites for various projects over the years. None of them are current enough to be online or I could link some examples. Well, any of them may be mirrored in the wayback machine but that is more than I need to make the basic point.

 

Past that, not to ruin your unintentional commercial for your host but it really is not that big of a deal to set up a basic free website. You do not need download some tool bar and accept the company watermark on all of your pages.

 

Let me outline some basics:

 

Level 1 would be something like facebook.

 

You can't really do anything with such a deal beyond putting up your own thoughts and feelings. The pages will look as the site owner decides they shall look. OK, you don't need HTML for that but even so...

 

Level 2 would be setting up a site using one of the popular blogging services (blogger, wordpress, etc.).

 

Now you begin to be able to make your pages look somewhat different from the standards forced on the work by the great corporation mentality. Usually, they have a couple dozen templates to choose from and you just pick one. You will have a site up in under an hour and you can begin posting right away.

 

If it happens that you don't care for any of the standard templates, then you can google for sites that have free templates which you can upload. If you still are not really that happy, you can always try messing around with the code that makes up the templates and see what you can do. Once you have a couple of the free templates downloaded to your own machine, then you can look at the code, make a change and open it up in your web browser to see what comes of it.

 

Changing the provided images to your own is fairly trivial. Just put your custom image files in the correct folder in the template and change the file name in the code sheet. Changing the colors is also simple enough but the codes for RGB do take a bit of time to get a handle on. If you are only changing stuff in local folders though, that really is not such a big deal.

 

Once you are doing that, you are headed into:

 

Level 3 which is going to have you learning how to actually make a web page. Which really is not all that hard. If you want to do this in the simplest way possible, I would recommend that you download the browser “Sea Monkey”.

 

Don't be afraid of it being on your computer (really, downloading various toolbars is a much larger risk to your system). Sea Monkey is really a sibling to firefox and both are built on Mozilla, which itself is based on the old school Netscape Navigator. The code for all of them has been public for years.

 

Anyway, Sea Monkey has a feature that lets you build your own web pages in an environment little different from a word processor. You can type your words as you would like to, drag and drop your pictures from a folder and so on.

 

At this point, don't get caught up in trying to use all of the advanced features that are beginning to be available to you. Just pay attention to whatever message you are trying to communicate and presenting that in a way that your possible audience can get to as easily as possible.

 

Frames are a perfectly good way to meet your information needs. So if you run into someone who declares that they are a technology from the last century, pretty much ignore them.

 

CSS, well, that is certainly a useful tool. The biggest reason to start using that is to automate a bunch of maintenance tasks that are trivial but become time consuming once you have like 6-8 or more pages on your site. Make one change to the CSS template and it automatically dumps to your other pages.

 

Once you do start using CSS, there are other things that you can do with it but it really is best to wait until it becomes something that will help you rather than a way to make pages that tell your audience that you are impressed with all the cool things that you can do and are willing to let the actual information content slip.

 

Level 4 is where you are ready to move on to the real power tools part of page design.

 

Download a program called “Notepad++”. Not simply notepad that is already on every windows computer (although you can make perfectly good pages in regular notepad). You will need the better version as it has all manner of goodies.

 

It will check your codes for you as you type. Heck but it color codes your tags for you as you type so that you can see visually if there are errors before you save and check your work in a browser. It has features that help you to keep your work well organized.

 

Notepad++ is able to do all of this not only in HTML but is all of the major programming languages that are fully optional for the web. So if you decide to learn one or more of them (python, perl, PHP are just a few), then you already have a great tool for writing code in any of them.

 

Now, let me tell you some things that at least a noob page designer really should need to know:

 

Stay away from any software that makes your pages for you. These are really bad from the point of view of both trying to learn and trying to get a great end result. First off, you don't have any control over what code gets written for you. Generally, they will write a whole lot of code and they will do so in whatever way that the company that made the product says will be done.

 

There is no guarantee that the generated code will be what you want and you may end up with something that is different than what you were trying to do. When that happens, you will be at an extreme disadvantage as you likely will have no idea how to read the code that was made and even if you do, it is usually fairly buggy and inefficient.

 

I have seen too many web sites that have been done that way. When you need to check a code, it often turns out that the software made a few pages of code for something that could have been done in less than a dozen lines. It will likely be done in java, which is a language that is suitable for making real software in. You really need at least a couple of semesters of school to be able to handle that (or a couple of years of learning how to program on your own).

 

Never use java, flash or other technology to make visual animations on your pages. It really distracts from the information that you are trying to get out. That and it screams “Look what I can do” far more than even the people who use eight different fonts on a single page. It just requires more advanced tools. If you would not use eight fonts on one page, then why would you feel the need to use animations?

 

Do learn how to use FTP (file transfer protocol). At page design level 3, you may still be fine using the automated uploader that most hosts provide. By that time, you will likely be ready to use FTP anyway. Certainly, by the time that you get to level 4, you will really want to be doing FTP anyway.

 

If you only ever change one file every several days, then a web uploader is probably adequate. It will not be good though as you will have to mouse click to step through your folder tree to get to the place where the file needs to be. With FTP, you will have an interface that shows your work on your local computer on the left side and your work on the web host on the right side, both will the folder trees open to drag and drop from one side to the other. If you are making a fairly large change, then you can make all the changes locally and then drag and drop a whole segment of your folder tree in one action.

 

Do not get stuck on some special deal for hosting your site. My ISP (A&T) gives me 100MB for storage for free. They don't make a huge deal over how much data I transfer every month, although if it got to be quite a lot, they would be telling me about upgrading my service to a package where I could save money. Honestly, though, I have plenty of bandwidth for free and if I need more, that is about as complicated as picking the right cell phone plan for the airtime that I might use.

 

Also, do not get get stuck on some deal for what is presented as a really small price. It usually is going to be far more than you could be paying. Since web hosting is not a monopoly business model like cable TV is, there is no reason to be dealing with that type of predatory pricing.

 

In all honesty, the standard price for a web site is like $10 setup and that reserves your web address for three years, after which you have to renew it for another three years. Then you need only pay a very small fee for monthly service.

 

Right now, godaddy.com is charging $1.99/month for the first three months and $2.99/month after that. No tool bars required and no stupid watermarks on your pages.

 

Past that, if you keep at this, you may eventually reach the point of having a large and complicated site. When that happens, you will want to move to site management products such as Drupal (what the RRS uses) or Joomla.

 

Actually, that will put you back in the world of using templates for lots of stuff. However, you will really want them at this point because you will not want to be bothered with a lot of stuff for which templates are a great solution. However, you will also benefit by having quite a few more advanced tools such as the ability to use the admin control panel on your web host.

 

The admin control panel has too many features to list here but I will tell you about one. Let's say that you have a forum on your site and you hand out stars based on post count. With the admin CP, you can schedule a service in advance that checks all the users a few times a day to see if they have passed a certain point where the account needs to be updated. When that happens, the website will make the changes for you. Nothing for you to do once the feature has been set up.