How Hard is it to Create a Web Page These Days?

I did my website on google sites.
Free, pretty easy to set up and create. Has templates with contact forms and all the usual stuff. Easy peasy.
Only downside is the googlesites\blah\blah address, but my son just created a site with google and linked it from a xxxxx.com name which he paid for.
Del
(google delsbows to see my site as an example)

ga

They claim that it takes 90 seconds to make a website.

This is a little bit off the point, but:

If I was going to create a non-commercial web site, I'd very strongly consider a wiki.

I'd recommend Foswiki, because I've used it (or its predecessor, still available btw, TWiki) for a long time.

You don't have to allow others to edit those wiki pages if you don't want--Foswiki gives you ways to password protect or lock all or selected pages.

But, if you intend to sell something on the site, and need the ability to accept credit cards, I'm not aware of a wiki that supports that kind of thing. (It may be easy to do, but I've never looked into it.)

I am not selling anything, just promoting my marketing communications business. So I don't need PayPal or any of those other services on Foswiki. I just need to be able to build an attractive web page.

It sounds like Foswiki might be a fit, then.

Joomla! or any other CMS ...pretty easy to get the hang of it and plenty of options to customze it to your needs.

Joomia looks pretty good. I looked at some of the sites done with Joomia, and they look pretty good. Free, too! I like that. Thanks, Akur.

You're welcome. There are plenty of free tutorials and template sites on the web to get you started. Good luck.

There is a very good "For Dummies" book that deals web design. I'm sure Amazon will have, got mine a few years ago but have not had much of a chance to use it yet.

a few years back I compared word, visio, powerpoint, and a couple of others with a similar mockup, and published to html, rendered in IE.

I found Powerpoint to be the most accurate, WYSIWYG wise.

and it is reasonably easy to learn.

so that gets my vote for easy. I'm trained in Visio, so that would be a strong contender too.. but Dreamweaver comes with ton of usable flash that can make one look very pro, if you can teach yourself, and are willing to put in a few days learning.

good luck

Chris

I did exactly the same thing and came to exactly the same conclusion! 2 rights might make a wrong though :-) The problem with more sophisticated features is that it takes time to learn. Longer than the actual work. Also realise that a decent website must be kept up to date, and it will be absolutely wonderful if someone else could take over that work, without similar sophisticated training. Since most know Powerpoint already, this is a doddle. Other advantages: - the site is portable and can be used for presentations with little re-work - you can save as a PPS and email (if small): people can see it without a web connection - I saved my PPS to business card CDs and gave them away instead of business cards BTW I have moved totally over to Openoffice; sick to the eye teeth of being servile as a paid beta tester for MS products. Have not looked back.

Doddle? Is that good or bad?

Interesting post, many thanks.

A few questions from a website "dummy" if I may?

Can you also use Open Office to make a website (the powerpoint eqivalent is Impress if I remember correctly!)?

Have you tried Libre Office yet, I have it in German, its from the same source code as OO, but as Oracle are making life difficult for Open Source, it has been "cut free". I like it.

I have both MS Office 2010 Plus and Libre on the same PC as I have found that Libre can open .PDFs, that MS Office cannot, it takes a long time - a minute or so, but it works even on protected .PDFs (or at least on the ones I have tried it on!!)......a big plus for me personally.....

MS Office, if you buy it carefully (ebay for example), need not cost more than $80 for a fully legal copy to download from a MS website (I have the Plus version that way) and it is a refreshing change after 8 years with Office XP (also called Office 2002).....

In the meantime (6 weeks) I have become a fan of MS Office 2010 through recent translation work......even the ribbons are good and the indexing feature is simply WONDERFUL......

I do like the business card CD idea, simply brilliant.....many thanks for that point alone.

I find mircrosoft's OneNote application very handy for creating "personal websites", they navigate like a web site but are only avaliable on my computer. It's done in a similar fashion, but you publish the pages, this essentially saves them as HTMLs.

OneNote is better than word as it has more options and is very easy to use.

You might also want to look at Wordpress. It is more or less a forms based affair. Pretty easy to set up and maintain. Cheap or free if you don't mind their ads on your site.

I noticed FLASH mentioned in this thread.

One thing to remember: If you want iPhone users to access your website, either avoid FLASH, or create alternate pages (avoiding FLASH on those pages).

I get very annoyed when I'm on the road and try to look up something, and all I get is the "no-can-render" cube on the screen of my iPhone.