What is the best tool for building a website?

I am an expert computer technician but when it comes to software I'm no expert at all, esspecially when it comes to building a website. I want to make my own website and I wanted your opinions on which web service to use. thanks for the advice. Last year I tried the one from yahoo, but I didn't like it very much.

go daddy is very good and cheap but u need to have something like dreamweaver to use it.

Notepad. Go to htmlgoodies.com and read some tutorials in html then move on to css and see where you progress from there. Html is very easy and much more satisfying than using a program like dreamweaver or frontpage.

Marley said:

Notepad. Go to htmlgoodies.com and read some tutorials in html then move on to css and see where you progress from there. Html is very easy and much more satisfying than using a program like dreamweaver or frontpage.

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Agreed. While I use Dreamweaver from time to time, Notepad is very effective. If you can commit a week to reading up on html you will be able to make anything that your little heart desires. There are plenty of online tutorials. I am sorry that I have not taken the time to provide you with some links, but they are easy to find. Also, if there is a decent book store near by you are SURE to find any number of book regarding html.

Like anything else, if you know the foundation, you are going to be a lot more effective on everything thereafter.

Good luck!

Like someone else said godaddy has good hosting, they also have a website builder you can get with your plan, although I've never tried it the demo looks user friendly.

yeh notepad is awesome and so is dreamweaver. for hosting if you want it free i would go to www.1asphost.com (for asp) or www.1freehost.net(for php) thats if you want asp or php etc if not just html either probably 1asphost tho.

On Windows I like notepad++, and under Linux Scribes.
They're both all-around text editors, like notepad, but with syntax coloring and lots of other usefull stuff.
And w3schools is a nice site to learn html and css.

I do not know a whole lot about hosting (I have used GoDaddy in the past though and it worked nicely) but for actually writing the HTML/CSS/etc. I like doing it by hand. The What-you-see-is-what-you-get programs are easy to use but the code they make is ugly.

If your just starting out.

Use a wysiwyg and try and understand what the insertions are. Once you start finding out the basics, you will be finding yourself using notpad more often. It is faster and lets you make some darn pretty html.

For mass production for like links and pictures. I will use hotkeys in notepad, it just seems more efficient to use that. I do for new complex things revert to a editor. Then clean it up in notepad.

I did almost my whole site in notepad, with very little help with a wysiwyg editor. There was a few spots I wanted to see how it was done first. Once I seen the html in action, off I went.

I suggest as your learning HTML fresh, learn CSS while your at it. It will make your life much easier changing colors, sizes and positions.

Most editors clog up html with the styles. I like to use an external stylesheet. If you have an issue you don't have to wade through long lines to find one tiny mistake.

I would say Dreamweaver all the way, developing pages in it is faster than in a text editor, and you have exactly the same degree of control. But then I am a designer rather than a coder, and I want pretty websites above neat code. Definitely steer clear of other WYSIWYG editors like Frontpage as the code they produce is horrible.

Enablingwolf said:

I suggest as your learning HTML fresh, learn CSS while your at it. It will make your life much easier changing colors, sizes and positions.

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Agreed, I use CSS to do all my layout / design stuff. Once it is pretty much like you want all you have to do is change a little setting in the CSS file to change the font, size, color, etc. I think most of HTML / CSS is pretty simple and easy to use if you take your time learning it.

lol

There is a lot of folks who visit sites the first thing they do is look at the code. I know some of my buds judge my code before even venturing into any pages.

A nice advantage over clean code and notepad.

You find a typo. Do you open Dreamweaver and wait for it to load? Or do you open noepad and get busy editing it? Finding the tiny spot in a large page can be hard sometimes if the code is all messy. I am the king of typos.

I like HTML Kit for doing my HTML editing, it's fairly usefull and free.

For my Mac I use Taco HTML Edit.

Other than that, Notepad ftw!

Also one more thing that's usefull when you code it in a text editor is the w3c validator.
This validates the code you make and shows you when you're using a tag in a bad way or forgot a closing tag.