Web Developers?

[YTNUKLR]

I want to learn about developing a website. So far, the content I have in mind is mainly about some of the vintage replica parts I have been working on when I can (student life...).

I know some programming in a language called Scheme and I know HTML, but I am not sure how useful that is! Or, even to what extent programming is necessary? Java? I would want to make it look pretty snazzy and all.

If you have the time, I would love a crash-course in getting a website going. The hope is that the website would be profitable, at least eventually. What kind of costs are associated with a typical "small business"/personal site?


Thank you,

[stomachmonkey]

Go look at a CMS like Mambo or Joomla, there is also Plone and Drupal which IMHO are better but are less turnkey and require more of a skill set.

Or even a blogging platform like Wordpress.

Think of this like building a house. Do you want to be the architect, builder and decorator or do you want to take an existing floorplan, make some changes and pick colors?

A CMS or blogging platform will let you focus more on the content than the back end.

As far as costs for a small ecomm site you need a cart, for free get OSCommerce, paid, look at Volusion.

You'll need a Merchant Account, you may be able to get away with a PayPal or Google gateway, other wise it's Skipjack or my personal recommendation, authorize.net

[ErVikingo]

any opinions or insite on Sitespinner?

TIA

[Tishabet]

Originally Posted by stomachmonkey

Go look at a CMS like Mambo or Joomla, there is also Plone and Drupal which IMHO are better but are less turnkey and require more of a skill set.

Or even a blogging platform like Wordpress.

Think of this like building a house. Do you want to be the architect, builder and decorator or do you want to take an existing floorplan, make some changes and pick colors?

A CMS or blogging platform will let you focus more on the content than the back end.

As far as costs for a small ecomm site you need a cart, for free get OSCommerce, paid, look at Volusion.

You'll need a Merchant Account, you may be able to get away with a PayPal or Google gateway, other wise it's Skipjack or my personal recommendation, authorize.net

Excellent advice here.

[nostatic]

The hardest part of a site is design and aesthetic. Second is information architechture. After that it is mostly how good is the content and how do you get traffic. The coding these days is largely canned and frankly not much of a concern unless you have very specific needs/goals that you want to deal with.

CMSs are great and suck. Those that use them know why I say that. But you can't beat them for quickly getting running.

If you aren't a graphic/visual designer, my advice is to befriend one and work on that. But you have to know what/who/why you're selling first. Design follows content.

[Zeke]

That's probably good advice from nostatic. A graphic layout of the overall design like the old story boards used in advertising will yield some initial feel to the final concept.

[rennch]

Also in the biz....stomachmonkey and nostatic are right on.

[rattlsnak]

Originally Posted by emptyo

Also in the biz....stomachmonkey and nostatic are right on.

+1


I started by using canned programs and the more I got into it, the more I wanted to learn and now use Deamweaver, CSS and PHP. As you will see, there are quite a few different coding and scripting languages and not all ISP hosts support them. You will not come close learning what they all have to offer so my advise when it comes to scritping is to go with a well known 'big' language like ASP or PHP and stick with it.

[911Rob]

Website building Questions

[Endat]

go with PHP because it can be run on both linux and windows servers.. and it's more widely used. I'm actually a web developer by profession... I'm working on a little project for people like you guys, who know what want but dont quite have the experience.

I have never used canned programs to develop a website, they're useless if you have your own ideas for your website.. they're great if you want to copy an existing site, so im told.

[David]

Any updates to these suggestions after 13 years?

My wife does magazine graphic design and is looking to add website design to her offerings.

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by David

Any updates to these suggestions after 13 years?

My wife does magazine graphic design and is looking to add website design to her offerings.

Designing or building?

She doesn't need to do both.

If she's a designer she should really be looking at getting into UI/UX.

Far more lucrative than website design because no one really needs that anymore.

[id10t]

Originally Posted by stomachmonkey

Designing or building?

She doesn't need to do both.

If she's a designer she should really be looking at getting into UI/UX.

Far more lucrative than website design because no one really needs that anymore.

Web really breaks down into 3 areas, 4 if you want to count connectivity and server administration so the website actually has a place to exist...

Back end - what I do and enjoy (as well as sysadmin stuff - think DevOps). Back end code to provide the data exchange between front end and back end. No user interface - that is front ends job, unless you need something for a proof of concept, etc. Coffee drinking bearded grunts.

Then you have front end. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, things like Angular/AngularJS, View, etc. Can end up being saddled wtih UI/UX design work as well as implementing the designed look/feel/behaviors. Tea drinking mac users, somewhat hipster types, etc.

And finally, UI/UX. User Interface and User Experience. Where do people need to go, how do they get there, how intuitive is it, etc. A *good* UI/UX person will care about people on slow connections, small screen devices, using assistive devices (ADA compliance, the web used to be 100% in the HTML 1.0 days but then Javascript and such started breaking it all... ), etc. Drinks nothing but imported tea and is so hipster you'd see a picture of 'im in the dictionary next to the word.

"Full Stack" isn't.... it is the back end plus front end. They still need us server admin types.

DevOps is server admin types who can code, though it is generally easier to teach someone who can code how to be a server admin than it is to teach a server admin or networking person how to code. Even then ones that can do it tend to view it as too frustrating...



Right now we're redoing our student portal and the student-facing side of the SIS/ERP (ie, registering for classes, financial aid, grades, applying to graduate, etc - you know, important stuff). We have one UI/UX guy on contract, he works on layout, color, etc. and creates templates. The folks doing the front end work take his templates and cuts 'em up into components and turns them into real functional code, working with the back end guys to define and develop the REST APIs backing it all. Most of these folks are contractors that we're trying to get FT lines for to move 'em into...

The rest of us do both front end and back end (and I do back end and server admin stuff and the very very very rare front end job, and that gets no extra styles, etc but it works and is simple to update/change) pretty much all the time, flopping back and forth either as we work thru an individual ticket ("display timestamp of X even under student demo info on screen ABC" means back end changes in EGL/VG and front end changes in JSP) or as we work on entire projects as one big ticket item.

We're kinda thin on the ground, if you know or can fake knowing Java (w/ Spring) and HTML/CSS/JS and especially Angular and want to live in beautiful N Florida (what heat wave? -it is like this every year...) shoot me a PM.

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by id10t

Web really breaks down into 3 areas, 4 if you want to count connectivity and server administration so the website actually has a place to exist...

Back end - what I do and enjoy (as well as sysadmin stuff - think DevOps). Back end code to provide the data exchange between front end and back end. No user interface - that is front ends job, unless you need something for a proof of concept, etc. Coffee drinking bearded grunts.

Then you have front end. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, things like Angular/AngularJS, View, etc. Can end up being saddled wtih UI/UX design work as well as implementing the designed look/feel/behaviors. Tea drinking mac users, somewhat hipster types, etc.

And finally, UI/UX. User Interface and User Experience. Where do people need to go, how do they get there, how intuitive is it, etc. A *good* UI/UX person will care about people on slow connections, small screen devices, using assistive devices (ADA compliance, the web used to be 100% in the HTML 1.0 days but then Javascript and such started breaking it all... ), etc. Drinks nothing but imported tea and is so hipster you'd see a picture of 'im in the dictionary next to the word.

"Full Stack" isn't.... it is the back end plus front end. They still need us server admin types.

DevOps is server admin types who can code, though it is generally easier to teach someone who can code how to be a server admin than it is to teach a server admin or networking person how to code. Even then ones that can do it tend to view it as too frustrating...



Right now we're redoing our student portal and the student-facing side of the SIS/ERP (ie, registering for classes, financial aid, grades, applying to graduate, etc - you know, important stuff). We have one UI/UX guy on contract, he works on layout, color, etc. and creates templates. The folks doing the front end work take his templates and cuts 'em up into components and turns them into real functional code, working with the back end guys to define and develop the REST APIs backing it all. Most of these folks are contractors that we're trying to get FT lines for to move 'em into...

The rest of us do both front end and back end (and I do back end and server admin stuff and the very very very rare front end job, and that gets no extra styles, etc but it works and is simple to update/change) pretty much all the time, flopping back and forth either as we work thru an individual ticket ("display timestamp of X even under student demo info on screen ABC" means back end changes in EGL/VG and front end changes in JSP) or as we work on entire projects as one big ticket item.

We're kinda thin on the ground, if you know or can fake knowing Java (w/ Spring) and HTML/CSS/JS and especially Angular and want to live in beautiful N Florida (what heat wave? -it is like this every year...) shoot me a PM.

She's a graphic designer.

My take is she wanted to get into website design.

She's not interested in the rest so was no need to bring it up.

[3rd_gear_Ted]

Some how the way everything plays together needs to be visualized and you need some kind of requirement for others to work with.
Find a way to create an Entity Relationship Drawing (ERD), step #1.

[sugarwood]

Originally Posted by David

Any updates to these suggestions after 13 years?
.

www.wix.com

[RobFrost]

Originally Posted by David

Any updates to these suggestions after 13 years?

My wife does magazine graphic design and is looking to add website design to her offerings.

If she's vaguely competent with a computer should install WordPress on a cheapish hosting package, and install a theme from somewhere like themeforest.net. she will find one specifically designed for publishing a magazine type web site. That will give her the most flexibility and lowest ongoing cost, and usually a great design out of the box.

Sent from my SM-G988B using Tapatalk

[flipper35]

What they said, design and development are two different things. I can make a website do what you want, but I can only make ugly ones so I always had someone design the aesthetic.

If you want to pay a little extra, Adobe ColdFusion gets you lots of capability and is far less cumbersome than .net for SQL and other integrations.

[rockaria]

Simple Explanation of which CMS (Content Management System) web platform to use:

Drupal = Engineer
Joomla = MBA
WordPress = Writer/Artist
WIX = People who used to eat paste in grade school.
Everything else = Hipsters and people who think a 4 door Mustang is cool!

Honestly, WordPress is easy, will do the job, can be customized, and is the most widely used CMS. You can't go wrong.

[David]

Good info. She's a graphic designer so she'd just be making websites pretty, not making websites.

She's uses Photoshop for her design work now. Is WordPress similar?