Help setting up a family website

[sbrown02]

I'd like to start a website for my family members (mom, dad, brothers, sisters, etc.) to share photos, family news/stories, online chat, etc.

I've never created a website before but am very PC and internet literate. What's the best advice for going about this, i.e., free tools, purchased services, software, anything and everything to help me out?

Thanks

[BabaFree]

The first thing I would recommend is to read through the HTML and CSS tutorials at www.w3schools.com. This will give you an understanding of the buiding blocks. There are several free WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editors such as Nvu that you could use to make the site. Or you could read the tutorials and make a basic page in notepad. A simple page for family members shouldn't be too hard, but if you're like me you'll realize that all this is great and you want to do it more frequently. You've always got forums like this if you get stuck on your project.

Hope this helps,
BabaFree

[mairving]

The basic process is:
-find a domain name (that no one else is using, shorter is always better)
-register your domain. Godaddy is one of the cheapest and most popular.
-find a host and sign up with them. More info in this post
-If you want to get something up quickly, then a CMS is the way to go. I am pretty fond of Joomla. You can use a free template until you know better how to write HTML/PHP.
-Learn HTML and/or PHP if you want to customize things on your site.

[dhamil0381]

Originally Posted by mairving The basic process is: -find a domain name (that no one else is using, shorter is always better) -register your domain. Godaddy is one of the cheapest and most popular. -find a host and sign up with them. More info in this post -If you want to get something up quickly, then a CMS is the way to go. I am pretty fond of Joomla. You can use a free template until you know better how to write HTML/PHP. -Learn HTML and/or PHP if you want to customize things on your site.

I would def try using Joomla for your family website.

You can install a photo gallery plugin called zoom from http://www.zoomfactory.org/. This is allow you to create a photo gallery for your family.

The great thing with CMS is that you can have a front end for visitor and then a registered area for your family to chat and view photos.

The only thing is that your hosting site must have a mysql database and php.

[sbrown02]

Great advice, I'll start reading/researching tonight. By the way, what's php?

Thanks

[glc]

If you want a simple free WYSIWYG webpage editor and don't know beans about HTML and all the other stuff, the Composer module in the Mozilla and Seamonkey suites does a fine job.