Software for website building

[susanmt]

I am hoping to create a website. As a lot of you will know we are planning to go travelling as a family next spring for 4 months, going to central America, studying spanish in Guatemala and travelling around as well as visiting family in Canada (dh has a sabbatical).

In order to keep in touch with family and friends (as well as mumsnetters, I'll post the address so you can all keep up with our exlpoits if you want to), we want to have a website where we can post pictures, keep a blog, have people post messages, etc etc so that people like my Dad can check up on what we are doing. I'd like to create it myself, its a skill I'd like to have and I'm hoping to use my childminder days in order to do it.

Can anyone suggest software for doing this that can create an attractive site, with the features we will need (mainly easy to update with lots of pictures, blog space, messageboard, different pages so we can have pages for different things like the kids etc) but that doesn't look too churned out like some of the free sites you can create on line. I also want to have our own domain so I dont want to be linked into something like freeserve as a name, I know how to get a domain as we have one for our holiday cottage website (which BIL did for us).

Does this make any sense? What would you suggest, oh great techy experts>>

thanks a lot!!!

I use macromedia dreamweaver - it's pretty expensive software but it is the one that most professionals use. There are cheaper/free visual web editors out there too which might be fine for what you're planning to do. As far as the blog and guestbook facilities are concerned, if you wanted to develop your own you'd need to learn something like PHP for developing your own web applications. There are some great free blogging sites out there like this one - imo it's hardly worth writing a blogging app from scratch!

Well the simplest one to use is Dreamweaver, or Netscape Composer (which generates better code and comes free with Netscape but perhaps isn't as good for really complicated websites)

But if you want to create dynamic content (i.e. the blog, guest book etc.), neither are any good. There are programmes that will do all that for you, but they're expensive and take a long time to learn. that's why I have a job! (not that I use them - we hand code everything as spacemonkey will testify! )

I suggest you make a basic site using dreamweaver and then search for a standalone guest book and blog - these are available free (usually with ads) or for a small fee.

In fact if you like, I can let you have our forum script (which you could use like a blog with comments). That would only be any good if your site is hosted on a Windows server though. If you're using Linux hosting, then I don't know.

Buen viaje!

you beat me to it sm!

yes SP is right, writing your own blog/guestbook/forum will involve hand coding (in PHP or ASP or coldfusion or some flavour of java). Dreamweaver and frontpage both offer facilities to build simple applications "visually" (rather than hand coding), but I have never used them and as far as I can see they're pretty useless from that point of view!

elloooo SP btw

hola sm.

long time no read. I'm still getting used to my new status as a working mother of 2 so no time for anything!

susan - I just read the bit about using your childminder days. If you have the time, then you could learn to hand code HTML/CSS - it'll save you the cost of Dreamweaver anyway. Let me know and I'll find you a good online tutorial thingumy.

oOh thanks. I wondered about learnign HTML but thought it miight be terribly difficult. Is it? If not, I'd be prepared to have a go!

No, HTML really isn't difficult to learn at all. I taught myself years ago by creating the page in a visual editor (like Dreamweaver or Frontpage), then looking at the code.

You could go the real purist route and just use notepad which has the advantage of being completely free!

There are loads of free HTML tutorials out there on the web - try googling on "HTML tutorial" or something like that. You could look at HTML Goodies for starters

good luck