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Hi guys,

I haven't written much in this forum topic but I was wondering what I should create a website with.

I know that publisher can have different header images on each page but freewebs cannot. Freewebs is easier but you have to purchase a domain name. I'm stuck in between.
I'm not sure which one I should create my website with. If you could think of one of these web creators that you could recommend please help me choose. Maybe you have another web creator that you might suggest.

Thanks
-TJ

You seem to be mixing up website editing software with a hosting company / server. I wouldn't use a free host as they usually cram the site with ads, have poor download speeds and generally suck. As for the site just use notepad ++ , I did for mine, as HTML isn't that complex, but neither is my site.

Another free alternative is Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005. It's a great piece of software and can create websites with advanced features such as logging in etc. Perhaps not the best for a beginner though, but it's worth a try.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vwd/

I don't know anything about web design. I'm a complete amateur in every sense of the word. I don't know much HTML and I don't know *any* PHP, and I'm still struggling with getting Simple Machines Forum to run on my server because I don't know what half of the things on the readme means. And yet my site is up and running, and so far, while I've been given a heavy dose of helpful opinions on how to make it better, no one has ever said "your site is the worst I've ever seen," (of course now someone will say it just to be silly, lol), and I've gotten quite a few compliments on it, surprisingly enough. Now I tend to promote the idea of making your own website every time I get the chance, because if I can do it, literally anyone can do it, lol.

For my website, I used a program called Nvu to create the layout. It's an editor sort of similar to Dreamweaver (or so I'm told, I've never actually used Dreamweaver) that lets you design your web pages without ever having to enter a single line of code (but if you want to enter HTML or PHP code, it has a built-in editor for that). It's easy to use, it has all of the features you'd find in similar editors... oh, and it's free . I made my backgrounds and all that with Texture Maker and then I edited them into shapes and whatnot, and created most of the background-blended text, with a program called The Gimp, which is another piece of free software. All told, my only monetary expense in making my website came from buying Texture Maker, which was purchased for game-making anyway, so technically, it didn't cost me a dime to design the site.

For web-hosting, I use a service called A Plus (and if you tell them I sent you, I get a free month ). With them, I paid $7.46 per month for their Solo XR package for the first three months, and now I'm paying $9.99 per month, and with that I get 170 GB of hard drive space, 2,000 GB monthly transfer (and if I need more, it's remarkably cheap against everyone I had compared them to), 500 e-mail addresses, 3 MySQL databases, and 2 free domain names. That's right... I didn't pay Go Daddy or some other company to get my domain names because they were included in my package. Top this off with 24-hour customer service by online chat, e-mail, or telephone (and thus far they've been extremely helpful, patient, and courteous, even with my most amateur and/ or complicated questions), your own personal customer service representative after a few months of service (you can call him whenever, wherever, and with any sort of question regarding your site and service), and an incredible amount of web design and building tools, including a high-quality upload tool, marketing services (including free search engine submission on some ungodly number of engines), and design tools, and you have what is, in my limited experience-based opinion anyway, what has to be the best web-hosting service out there. Take a look at their packages, which range in cost from $5.95 per month to around $100 per month. You can try them out by paying month-to-month, or you can get a full year right off the bat, and it's totally worth it. Oh, and don't forget to tell them Matt T. from misoftstudios.com told you about it lol, free months never hurt

Also, I'm not sure if he's still offering it or not, but keep an eye out for TGC-member Josh, and e-mail him to ask about his hosting plan. He offers a really great service, marked by his own personal experience as a web designer. When I was first setting out to find a web host, he helped me learn about stuff and laid out a remarkably great plan for me to use, which was inevitably turned down by my team, but is still a fantastic service nonetheless. He owns/ manages/ runs Coder's Turf, and he was absolutely fundamental in getting the TGC Webring up and running (in fact, he's hosting the website and built the whole site for our organization from top to bottom). He's definitely worth talking to about this .

On that note, I'll close with this: Whatever you decide to do, however you get your website online, you should join the TGC Webring. It's a great way to get the word out there that your website exists and can help you get hits month after month. Membership in the webring is absolutely free and it's made to help you promote your site. If you want to know more about the webring, and if you'd like to get a little insight into how it came to exist, check out this thread on the subject.

Personally I would stay away from MS Publisher as its a desktop publisher and not a Web design tool. It creates very inefficient and poor HTML code. The same goes for MS Word too, although its better than Publisher. Be aware though that it does insert tonnes of Microsoft XML rubbish into the code.
Be wary of Microsoft Visual Web Developer as I seem to remember from my brief look that some of the fancy stuff requires a .Net Web server which usually means more expensive Web hosting. The same goes for Frontpage as some features require Frontpage Extensions installed on the server (which Microsoft no longer support).
There are plenty of free/opensource Web page designer packages about but make sure you get one which is WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) so you can lay things out and see what it will look like inside of the editor. For beginners this is essential unless you want to learn how to code HTML manually. Its worth the effort learning if you intend to do lots of Web work but if you want instant results, go for a WYSIWYG editor. You can always examine the code it creates later and see how it all works.
Personally, I use DreamWeaver but only because its the best and its a big part of my job. Its expensive and seems complicated for beginners but it really is the best in the business.

do what i did, buy ezgenerator, its a wysiwyg editor with over 3000 templates, comes with some plugins, lets you insert your own html and has quite a few php scripts with it such as blog, shop and several more.

as for hosting... freeola! (getdotted) for as little as £2.99 a YEAR, its quite cheap, it comes with free php, cgi and ssi support, has unlimited webspace, free advertisement (of sorts), unlimited pop3 e-mail addresses, optional mysql database (pay monthly) but has to uploaded by ftp (dial up) which can be a pain, but you could buy a php ftp upload script (such as myftp) which allows you to upload files to an ftp domain via browser (you need to upload it to your server first).

hope that helped

Thanks guys youv'e been really helpful!

It just depends what your website consists of. If you just need a few simple pages that display text and images on them then you don't need anything extra. But if you want anything more technical (login system for example) then yes, you will need a .net server.

Freewebs man.
Publisher is very annoying. Just writing and pasting whereas Freewebs u can have Forums and stuff.