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If you're just starting out trying to build a website, you'll need some basic webpage design software. There are many, many products on the market today. Almost too many. It's confusing really because of the great number of them. But there are some free software products referred to as WYSIWYG programs (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) that are quite easy to use.
HTML, which stands for hypertext-markup-language, is the accepted program language of the Internet. Most people run at the very mention of it. They think they can never learn such a thing. "It's too techie", they sometimes say. And they are right from a beginner's standpoint. But why not learn webpage design with one of the WYSIWYG programs first, then pick some of the code along the way?
HTML most likely will be picked up by many as they go along with building basic web pages. It might start with inserting images, although most WYSIWYG software has a drag-and-drop feature for this. It will look very strange at first, but within a short time, the basic functions of using it will start to make sense. Having a good instructor to teach webpage design would an enormous help too. He could introduce HTML slowly at first and explain it's uses until it becomes more familiar to you.
But enough about HTML for now, we want to build a web page. For two of the easier WYSIWYG sites on the Web, go to either Squidoo.com or Weebly.com. Both have great tutorials to help get you started with webpage design and are easy to learn. They are however slightly different. Let's examine Squidoo first.
Squidoo language may seem a little odd at first to some. They call webpages "lenses" and the people who design them (you) "lensmasters". Webpage design takes only two basic steps; assembling an outline of how your site will look and filling it in. You first choose a series of boxes called "Modules". These are information compartments that you assemble in the order you want them to appear on the right side of the screen. You can select modules for text or images or many other special uses. Once done, go fill them in with information. That's it! In no time you'll be speedily building webpages and at no cost. It's completely free!
Weebly is also free, but the software for webpage design (also a WYSIWYG type of editor) is quite different from Squidoo. It's actually a little more advanced, in my opinion, and I don't mean that in a techie way. You just have more options. You can even choose a web template to design your site around, which can look downright professional. Where you sort of pre-build the layout in squidoo, at weebly you build as you go, dragging in modules similar to squidoo, then adding content. You not only can add images and graphics but also audio and YouTube footage. It's a little quirky to start in that the modules tend to jump on the page as you drag them down, but you get used to it. One discovery I made quite by accident was that I completely built a site without a template. Looking a little bland, I decided to check out the array of templates weebly offers. I clicked on the button and a string of thumbnail templates appeared at the top of the page. Not really knowing what I was doing, I just rolled my cursor over the first one and in a split second it appeared on my webpage in full scale, rearranging the page slightly to fit in all my content. It was suddenly beautiful, I thought, looking at my creation. It looked like a real designer had done it with some of that fancy software for webpage design. I kept trying other templates in this fashion until I found the one I wanted and clicked to select it. Done!
There are other WYSIWYG websites out there, but for pure ease of use starting out, I would stay away from trying to learn to use more difficult software for webpage design and go with one of these until you gain more confidence. Have some fun!
HTML, which stands for hypertext-markup-language, is the accepted program language of the Internet. Most people run at the very mention of it. They think they can never learn such a thing. "It's too techie", they sometimes say. And they are right from a beginner's standpoint. But why not learn webpage design with one of the WYSIWYG programs first, then pick some of the code along the way?
HTML most likely will be picked up by many as they go along with building basic web pages. It might start with inserting images, although most WYSIWYG software has a drag-and-drop feature for this. It will look very strange at first, but within a short time, the basic functions of using it will start to make sense. Having a good instructor to teach webpage design would an enormous help too. He could introduce HTML slowly at first and explain it's uses until it becomes more familiar to you.
But enough about HTML for now, we want to build a web page. For two of the easier WYSIWYG sites on the Web, go to either Squidoo.com or Weebly.com. Both have great tutorials to help get you started with webpage design and are easy to learn. They are however slightly different. Let's examine Squidoo first.
Squidoo language may seem a little odd at first to some. They call webpages "lenses" and the people who design them (you) "lensmasters". Webpage design takes only two basic steps; assembling an outline of how your site will look and filling it in. You first choose a series of boxes called "Modules". These are information compartments that you assemble in the order you want them to appear on the right side of the screen. You can select modules for text or images or many other special uses. Once done, go fill them in with information. That's it! In no time you'll be speedily building webpages and at no cost. It's completely free!
Weebly is also free, but the software for webpage design (also a WYSIWYG type of editor) is quite different from Squidoo. It's actually a little more advanced, in my opinion, and I don't mean that in a techie way. You just have more options. You can even choose a web template to design your site around, which can look downright professional. Where you sort of pre-build the layout in squidoo, at weebly you build as you go, dragging in modules similar to squidoo, then adding content. You not only can add images and graphics but also audio and YouTube footage. It's a little quirky to start in that the modules tend to jump on the page as you drag them down, but you get used to it. One discovery I made quite by accident was that I completely built a site without a template. Looking a little bland, I decided to check out the array of templates weebly offers. I clicked on the button and a string of thumbnail templates appeared at the top of the page. Not really knowing what I was doing, I just rolled my cursor over the first one and in a split second it appeared on my webpage in full scale, rearranging the page slightly to fit in all my content. It was suddenly beautiful, I thought, looking at my creation. It looked like a real designer had done it with some of that fancy software for webpage design. I kept trying other templates in this fashion until I found the one I wanted and clicked to select it. Done!
There are other WYSIWYG websites out there, but for pure ease of use starting out, I would stay away from trying to learn to use more difficult software for webpage design and go with one of these until you gain more confidence. Have some fun!
About the Author:
A.J. Adams is a newbie Internet marketer who has learned the hard lessons of starting out. You can cut your learning curve getting up to speed with the techie side of this business by joining him at this site: http://www.How-To-Make-A-Webpage.com. It's totally Free and is very complete with 26 videos available in total. It teaches you all the stepsnecessary for webpage design from the very start.
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