Various ways to create a website

By using software

If you want to create a site quickly, the best way is to use a WYSIWYG (you get what you see). This will allow you to do work than to worry about the graphics. Most of the time the amateur sites are made this way. The most popular software are Publisher, Dreamweaver or AceHTML. They can easily insert content using an interface and change the location of the blocks graphically.

Unfortunately they are not free. NVU is a nice little free editor and quite effective.

You can also use the software in the other direction. In this case the goal is to see the result code that you type in the editor. For this it is necessary to learn HTML.

Platform based websites: WordPress, Joomla, Blooger

An average user generally uses a pre-made template (or Theme) for his or her own website to use it. Either the end user modifies the graphical parts or involves a designer to do so. The approach to create own template can be via hard coding (=writing codes manually) or via conversion software : there are software available which converts Photoshop PSD template to WordPress or Joomla template.

XHTML and CSS

XHTML is a markup language based on XML, which tells the browser what is the content to display. CSS allows for it to specify the formatting, aesthetics. In this case, you use a simple text editor and so you must type in lines of code. It is of course more restrictive than the first method because it is necessary to learn this language but in the end you have a website optimized and more often you have more liberties. If a new spell and CSS property if it is not handled by the software, you can always use it if you code your site directly.

Conclusion

The big problem is software out the final codes are often very heavy and not always up to standard. It tends to improve with the arrival of software qualities. It is also possible to code in XHTML while having an overview of graphical output (Dreamweaver allows).

What is the best method? The easiest way is to use software. They are improving day by day and many believe that later will be useless to have to learn the tags and properties to create a Web page because the result will be as good as if you had coded yourself.

To summarize

• If your goal is to get a site quickly, use a program.
• To have an optimized site, create your own XHTML / CSS.
• The best is to encode it directly with an overview on the side.