Building a website

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polochick

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229
Name
Liz
Edit My Images
Yes
Hi,

Wondering if anyone has any tips, anything would be very appreciated. I've built some websites in HTML previously (a long time ago), but now am trying to use dreamweaver (open to other suggestions) to build a website for my gap year, which I'm hoping I can get to look as professional as possible.

I'm trying to create this website for 3 purposes - 1) blog/reviews, 2) gallery of my photos (with potential to add in online sales option later but this is unlikely and it's more for my friends to see what I'm up to) and 3) photo gallery of friends horses for sale (just photos and text as sales would be offline and are only to illustrate).
I think I know how I'm going to build these three sections, but for the home page, I want to have something like this (sorry for the terrible sketch, please ignore squiggly lines), where you click on the images to get to the relevant section:



If I just make this a giant photoshop image, am I going to ruin any search engine potential? Is there a better way to do it? Also thinking about the idea of having the photos fade out when rolled over and displaying the text on top of the images rather than below.. is flash the only way to do this?
Or is it better to just build this page in HTML simply with notepad and be done with it?

Also are there any implications of me building this on a mac / viewing in safari versus on a pc with ie?

Many thanks in advance and sorry if it's not explained very well,
Liz
 
polochick said:
...open to other suggestions...
Click to expand...

KompoZer is very usable, especially for beginners in HTML

polochick said:
If I just make this a giant photoshop image, am I going to ruin any search engine potential?
Click to expand...

Yes, I'm afraid so...

polochick said:
Is there a better way to do it? Also thinking about the idea of having the photos fade out when rolled over and displaying the text on top of the images rather than below.. is flash the only way to do this?
Click to expand...

You can use Javascript/CSS t o get the same/similar effect

polochick said:
Also are there any implications of me building this on a mac / viewing in safari versus on a pc with ie?
Click to expand...

There may be layout differences, but check in safari, and correct for IE, not the other way around.


To be honest, if you're thinkng of using it as a personal blog, photo gallery, you can't go wrong with WordPress.
 
Dreamweaver is fine, no problems using that.

There is plenty of software to give you a good start for your website. Wordpress is very popular for Blogs - so read up on that.

You dont need to use Flash for fading images and the text on top of photos - you can do it with something like jQuery.

Good luck!
 
neos said:
To be honest, if you're thinkng of using it as a personal blog, photo gallery, you can't go wrong with WordPress.
Click to expand...
Yep, agreed, especially if you pay for a premium theme and get one that is designed to be used as a website and not just (or as well as) a blog. Very powerful tool indeed if you use it correctly (y)
 
I'm not a fan of Dreamweaver, it is pretty expensive for what it is. Especially if you know a bit of HTML already. You have done the hard bit in the design, the rest should be just making it.

As stated above Wordpress is the way to go for the blog, you could even use that to do some of the other pages.
 
I'd use Wordpress. There are plenty of themes that you can use and customise to get what you want. Also, plenty of plugins available to do interactive galleries. Given that you've not much experience with Wordpress you'll probably not get exactly the same look that you have in mind, but you will get a lot of the functionality. It's worth a play with.

Try to avoid using images for text.
 
polochick said:
If I just make this a giant photoshop image, am I going to ruin any search engine potential?
Click to expand...

Maybe, however you are going to have an Index.html file so you can put meta tags in there. You can also drop a TXT file in to the directory call it Robots.txt and go from there. You can start putting key words in but dont spam, else you will annoy Google :p
 
might be worth checking out Joomla. its an open source content management system.

takes a bit of setting up but once done you can apply a template to your content. there are many free templates

my website uses joomla:

www.rockfallfilms.co.uk

With regard to the large photoshop image, you could always chop it up and make a table or css layout.
 
Frankly whatever you use Dreamweaver or Wordpress etc you'll end up with horribly bloated files.

I once tried Dreamweaver and just gave up when I saw the files etc.

Personally I find it much easier to hand code in XHTML, PHP and CSS.

Any sites I make I then validate at www.w3.org
 
Getting to the first page on Google is a virtual necessity if you want to sell your work, get more jobs etc.

If you want your pages to be indexed by Google then you need to make them simple (forget Flash).

To get on the front page of Google then you need to have your site ready to go BEFORE you load it onto your host.

This is because Google much pefers sites that are finished or have a high degree of usability.

When you first load a site Google is fairly lenient and for a few months may give you a fairly high rating but then you will fall off the higher rating (some people call this the "sandbox").

You MUST also make your site navigation simple for both viewers and Search Engines.

Your Title is very important and Google puts a lot of emphasis on that.

It should also be different on every page.

In fact every page should really be optimized for a single keyword.
 
This is all really useful, thanks everyone for your replies. I think I might just go with the easy option (for me anyway) and build it simply ie avoid dreamweaver/wordpress, but use wordpress for the blog, and maybe throw in some flash for the gallery?
 
There are plenty of ready made Flash galleries available.

If you are using wordpress for the blog set that up first and have a play with creating pages, it's dead simple.
 
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