i am so confused with making a website of my own. please someone clarify and remove my pain.?

Question

Firstly I have to wan you that I might be totally misunderstanding the whole thing and don’t know what I am asking.

It’s been sometime since I really wanted to have my own website. So I did a whole bunch of html and css tutorial online. I struggled but I grasped the concept. Now I have started creating a website slowly but surely using Dreamweaver cs3 and watching DW cs3 tutorials on dvd and youtube at the same time.

But a friend said the other day it is easier and better to make a website using Wordpress. I didn’t know what Wordpress was, so I googled it and read up about it. What I learnt is that it is an open source blog, but it has loads of plugins and features so one can use it as CMS and make a good website with it too in a web hosting server.

Here are questions.

A) so why am I having hard time fighting with DW? Are there a lot of things I can with DW but can not with Wordpress? My website will be simple but I like to use slideshow and dropdown menus. What is so special about Wordpress?
B) What is web hostings anyway? Some are free and others are not free but not expensive either.
C) I do not even have internet access at home. When I sign up, whoever my ISP can host my website right? is it better than having a online web hosing? What is the difference?
D) If you have online line hosting, which means you can make a change to your website and upload it from any pc wherever you are, right? this sounds great so you can update your website when you are away travelling. Can I make my website with DW and upload it on a web hosting server? Or web hosting servers don’t support codings DW uses? Better to have an ISP host it for me? which option is cheaper?

How does the whole thing work? I am so confused and delusional. Please help me.

thank you in advance

Answer 1

A.) Wordpress is a built in software, and so while it is easy to use, the functions are very limited. It can't do even 5% of what dreamweaver can do. Wordpress is special because it is free, and it uses a built in software which allows people with no programming skill to create a blog, not a website.



B.) When you create a website, it needs to be available to the public 24/7. If you did that with your computer, you can never shut it off, and you might not be able to do anything with it besides using it as a server. Also, servers are different from computers a bit, and they are more effective for hosting. There are many different prices due to the functions they give. Each with different bandwidth and storage size. If you have a large strorage space, you can upload your own videos and files to your server. The bandwidth is important depending on your traffic. For example, a 50g bandwidth a month, means that people will be able to use a maximum of that size each month. Let's say that your website page is 50kb in size. Each time a page is veiwed, it is counted into your bandwidth.



C.) Yes, because it is them who will host your website, so you don't need to be worried about it being online.



D.) Yes, you can edit it from anywhere. But you must understand, that file hosting means that they give you a free space on their server. That is all. How you create your website, edit it or do anything will depend on only you. You can use whatever software. Just choose an option which supports the softwares you want to use.



Hope this helps you out a bit.....and sorry if I gave you a larger headache :)

Answer 2

Queston A).



A program like dreamweaver is for designing a web page - the graphics, the layout, the appearance, etc. Everything about the looks. You can fine-tune every little thing and make it look exactly like you want. This is great if you are designing for a company or yourself, and it's a site where you won't be making changes very often.



Wordpress is a blog tool. It's really just for posting an online journal, so it doesn't give you very many options. It is one step closer to a content management system (CMS) like Drupal. A CMS separates design from content to make a site easier to maintain. You have a theme that you can download or design to specify how the pages will look, and then you have an interface for adding "pages", "stories" or applications in side-blocks. It's very powerful, easy, and provides a very functional page that will look good almost right out of the box. If you're making the page for a client, a site using drupal will make it very easy for them to go in on their own and add an announcement or modify the content of pages.



Question B/C).



A web host is somebody who will handle requests for your website. Somebody has to do it. If your ISP has webhosting, that may be included in your account. They may or may not include the features you may want (php, perl, mysql, domain hosting, etc). An online host will cost money, but will provide a lot of features.



Question D). Any webpage can be modified from any internet connection - how easy that is depends on your design. If you are creating the entire page from scratch and uploading it, you will need to have access to the source to make a change, and you'll probably need to modify a file in the editor that created it (dreamweaver), and then FTP upload it to your host. Bascially, that means you'll have to have your own laptop with you, since you don't want to be editing dreamweaver-generated files by hand. If you're using a CMS, you can actually just go to your page, log in as an administrator, click "Edit" on a page, and change the content. You can't change the overall appearance very easily that way, but the changes you would likely need to make "in a pinch" would be content changes, not design changes.



My recommendation is to find a cheap online webhost that will do MySQL and php, or even one that specifically supports a CMS like drupal. You can very easily get a website up and running with the default theme, get some content up, and play around with the THOUSANDS of freely available modules that add neat features to the site. When you're ready to get into modifying appearance, you can start looking into theme editing. It's not quite as easy as just making an entire site, but with a theme, once you tell it what a page looks like and what a menu looks like, it will apply that to ALL the pages and ALL the menus - they will be automatically generated, too.



Hope this helps! Good luck!

Answer 3

Hi there.



First of all, Dreamweaver is way easier and more flexible than wordpress. Anyway, I suggest you create a website using www.justhost.com . For a small fee they will host your website and it will also come with an extremely good site builder ( to build your website ) along with many other tools. There are free hosts out there but they are limited with what you can do and your website adress will have to be in the format of ( www.'yourwebsitename'.'thehost'.com )



Here are a couple of decent free hosts to get you started. www.weebly.com and www.wix.com .



Hoped I helped you out. :)