I want to do a web site for my campaign, but I have questions...

[GlassJaw]

I can recommend the book I used to learn XHTML and thereby design the site listed in my sig. The book is called "HTML for the World Wide Web, 5th Edition" by Elizabeth Castro.

I recommend Web Design In a Nutshell from O'Reilly publishing.

 

[drothgery]

For editing, I use Notepad or Dreamweaver. Front Page is crap because it puts a lot of junk code into your files.

FrontPage 2003 is not FrontPage 98 -- it doesn't put significantly more junk in your code files than any other decent GUI web design tool (and doesn't mangle your code). Quite frankly, if you're not a professional web designer, FrontPage is a lot easier to work with than DreamWeaver, because it works like Office, which almost everyone is familiar with, rather than like Macromedia's other stuff.

There are many free ftp clients - it's the servers that cost money (usually - I did happen to find a free one but I forgot where). I use an older, free version of WS_FTP. LeechFTP is decent too.

Internet Explorer has a kind of hard to understand (but workable) FTP client built-in (most likely Mozilla/Firefox does as well). If you find yourself needing to FTP from a lot of different computers, it's worth figuring out how to make it work.

 

[The_lurkeR]

Another vote for the free open source FTP client FILEZILLA

http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/

For web space, your ISP most likely provides you with plenty, unless you want to have a message board or something more complicated.

 

[Mercule]

As for web design, if you don't want to go the easy route as mentioned above (I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, of course) I can recommend the book I used to learn XHTML and thereby design the site listed in my sig. The book is called "HTML for the World Wide Web, 5th Edition" by Elizabeth Castro.

Yes. I read that a couple of months ago. Most excellent book.

Oh, and, Ironwolf, SmartFTP does, in fact, have a free client. I just downloaded it last week.

For tools, I've just started setting up a new site with ASP.NET. Of course, that's what I work with all day, so it's at least as easy for me to use as straight HTML.

 

[Agamon]

I used SmartFTP for the past 3 years, until it started giving me problems for some reason while uploading my MB files. I went to EFTP, which can be found at SnapFiles (excellent site, btw), and I like it much better.

If you're not great with html, MSFP is a lot better than it once was, and probably the best WYSIWYG web page editor.

The FR Campaign Journal site linked above is well set up. Very clean and well organized. But those colors...yikes. Just my opinion, but it turns what would be a kick butt site to something hard to even look at for very long...

 

[Felon]

Thanks for the advice. I created the documents in Word for handout purposes, and figured I'd just save them as HTML and upload them. Work on making it pretty later.

I downloaded SmartFTP and ran it. Seemed really unintuitive. When I clicked on "Connect", it prompted me for a username and password for "yourserver". Didn't see anywhere to set up actual sessions.

I'll try Filezilla, thanks.

So, what's XHTML all about? What can a novice do with it? I always think of it as something you need the capability to create active server pages to make use of.

 

[Mercule]

So, what's XHTML all about? What can a novice do with it? I always think of it as something you need the capability to create active server pages to make use of.

Nutshell version: It's the latest generation of the HTML language. It attempts to add some of the discipline from XML into HTML. XHTML 1 is essentially just well-formatted HTML 4.

See here for an overview and some basic lessons/examples.

I try to use XHTML whenever I can. Mainly just because I hate messy code.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

I use a few different tools. I started out just using Notepad and a copy of HTML for Dummies. I eventually got hold of a cheap copy of FrontPage98 and have been using that mostly for assembling things though I often use Word to write things up, copy to FrontPage and then re-edit. Finally, I think I have always used an older free copy of WS_FTP pro for actual uploading and maintenance for no other reasons than it was free and it was what Earthlink was linking to for newbies.

That's all pretty much how it's been since July 19, 1998 when I first decided to use my Earthlink account free space to start up a webpage after having dumped AOL some time before.

I'd use a newer version of FrontPage if I could find a copy that didn't cost like a months rent. Meanwhile I couldn't care less that FP98 adds "junk code" to the HTML. Nobody LOOKS at the HTML code and as much as possible that also includes ME. If it works, I'm happy.

 

[Zulithe]

I use TopStyle Pro for xhtml/css and FileZilla as my FTP client. TopStyle Pro is not free, but there are some similar utilities which are. PSPad, for example.

as my webhost, I use host.sk which is free and ad-supported but offers mysql and php. however, my php is very poor so I haven't utilized it for my site yet. But I plan to someday.

 

[Thanee]

What do folks use to create their web sites? And equally important, how do you upload them?

Notepad.exe, SelfHTML and WS_FTP.

Bye
Thanee