The Energon Pub

Wondering if anyone had any advice for hosting a website. I saw that hostmonster.com was the best rated and seemed to have the best stuff for such a thing.

What kind of programs would be best for setting up a website? I used an old poopy version of FrontPage in school so idk about newer versions or better programs.

Themes? I've seen good ones but never come across any. What kind of price range would I be looking at for a sweet theme or could I make a decent one in something like FrontPage.

Thanks,
Bebop

My answers may be outside the scope of what you're asking, but here goes.

Cowboy Bebop wrote:Wondering if anyone had any advice for hosting a website. I saw that hostmonster.com was the best rated and seemed to have the best stuff for such a thing.

I use Hostmonster. I don't have any problems with them, but I also have no frame of reference. Apparently opinions on their customer service have the usual two camps, though. My web site is a group site, and I don't take care of the payment (just the site itself), so I don't know how it measures up against others in terms of getting a bang for your buck. But operability is fine.

Cowboy Bebop wrote:What kind of programs would be best for setting up a website? I used an old poopy version of FrontPage in school so idk about newer versions or better programs.

You mean doing the actual web site coding? I used EditPlus 2. It's good, but it's a glorified (and well-deserved glorified) Notepad. The best Notepad upgrade, anyway, IMHO. I don't use WYSIWYGs, and don't recommend them. If you're using one, it generally means you don't know HTML, and if you don't know HTML, you shouldn't be making a site.

Cowboy Bebop wrote:Themes? I've seen good ones but never come across any. What kind of price range would I be looking at for a sweet theme or could I make a decent one in something like FrontPage.

No answer for you here. My site using skins, which I'm assuming is more or less the same thing. I built them myself, though, with CSS, so I don't know anything about price ranges. If I'm totally off on what a theme is, let me know.

I'm totally lost with the acronyms lol

I know my way through html in the basics but I've designed other sites before so I don't think it'l be too much of a problem.

I would consider a skin a theme. Like phpnuke themes and the like.

Cowboy Bebop wrote:I'm totally lost with the acronyms lol

WYSIWYG is What You See is What You Get. It's a type of editor where you tell the computer what you want things to look like and it puts the code in for you. Problem is you get a ton of junk code that way.

CSS is Cascading Style Sheet, which you can use to style your web site.

Yeah, if you want to do things "right", you really should code your stuff by hand. I use just plain old Notepad myself, and occasionally Wordpad if I need to do any search/replace. (Although my current websites are in bad need of an overhaul now that I've learned more about HTML and CSS.)

Even the "better" editors like Dreamweaver produce ugly HTML code. HTML Dog is a pretty good site for a crash course in producing good code and CSS.

And, I think the word you're looking for is "templates" in terms of ready-to-use layouts. "Themes" is more a blog or forum software term.

Thanks for clearing that up. Templates would be the word I was looking for, themes popped in there from all the other freewebs/forums and whatnot I've designed.