I was recently asked a question about webhosts and website building tools so I thought it worthwhile to put those thoughts here in case others have the same questions. If not, just skip to the next article. :)

Originally I did most of the work on gems4friends.com with Dreamweaver. DW is a mighty program capable of doing just about anything website related that you might want. Knowing HTML is highly recommended and knowing about CSS is a good idea.  

My boys' site, gotwarcraft.com, made use of a professionally designed template (you can buy these from a number of sites) and they've expressed their frustrations with working with that template. They put together a pretty nice site, though.  Makes gems4friends look, well, bad. :)

Some friends of mine use FrontPage, I never have. All I really know about it is that it adds wierd code to your site, which may cause issues in some cases. It also requires certain extensions to be loaded by your webhost.

Frontpage doesn't require you to know HTML, though. A big plus in a lot of people's books. If you want an HTML book try the Dummies book. Written in english, it'll get you up and running as quickly as anything else.

Gems4friends.com is done with XsitePro. If Dreamweaver is like a complete artists kit then XSP is a nice Paint by Numbers set. You can make a decent site with XSP much faster than with DW, but DW is much more powerful. XsitePro is also about half the price of DW and comes with a very nice tutorial which will get you up to speed fast. 

One of the really cool things about XSP is that you can easily maintain a very consistent site structure. If you make one change to your navigation menu, for example, it's instantly reflected site wide. Very cool. This makes gems4friends a lot easier to maintain.

XsitePro doesn't require HTML knowledge, but it is still good to know. It also automatically handles proper placement of images and such so you don't see the broken images.

Wordpress doesn't require any HTML knowledge and it's easy to change the look with "themes." Really easy. And there are probably about 4 millions sites that teach how to work with one another aspect of WP. The gems4friends blog is a wordpress blog.

You need two things for WP: your host has to be able to run a WP blog (99.9% will) and you'll need to set up a MySQL database, which isn't quite brain dead easy, but is close.

Blogger.com is another "site solution" that is really easy to get started with, no databases needed, but you don't get a domain name and it requires some tweaking to be something approaching a professional site.

Great beginner blogging system, though. It might be a perfect addition to your site. Some very popular blogs are built with blogger, many with WP, and many with other systems.

Recommendations? If your budget permits I'd recommend XsitePro if you're not so interested in diving into the HTML code or just want to get a nice site whipped out in a nice easy manner. If you like to really muck around or want/need a more powerful solution, then I suggest DreamWeaver.

XSP is oriented towards people wanting to make money off the web (me) but I think it'd be cool for pretty much anyone's site. If you click through to the XSP site you'll see what can be done. The whole page that you'll see there was done with XSP. Make sure you watch the video(s).

There are, of course, other solutions, but I haven't used them.

One could, of course, always use raw HTML and notepad... Been there, done that, what a pain. :) My Unix friends do it with EMACS or VI. Ack.

If you put up a site with XSP or DW or Notepad then start up a blog to go with it (blogger.com, wordpress, whatever) and link back and forth between site and blog. 

You use the blog for comments, thoughts, updates, sortof like a running diary.

Hosts - Well, there are about 10 million web hosting services out there. Gems4friends.com is hosted with Kiosk.ws and I'm pretty happy with them. The last host shut down this site (and another) for getting too much traffic, the one before that fired it's entire staff. The sites worked, but communicating with them was impossible for months. I've  also used 1&1 and Thirdsphere for some other sites and like them both. 

Ok, time for bed.

Greg

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