Website building

[PerryCox]

Is it better to use webpage building software, or to build it yourself from scratch?

I want to create a professional looking website. I've built one previously using notepad and html, but I want something a bit flasher, scrolling galleries, ecommerce (Paypal payments)...

What would you reccomend? Where should I start? Would it be better to pay someone (though I think a professionally built website with payment facilities would cost £££ and be way out of my budget)?

Any advice would be appreciated

[Darkie]

There are lots of online website builders, by means of which you can build a professional website from scratch even without profound knowledge in PHP, asp, CSS and stuff. Some of them are quite affordable and easy to handle. You can Google them by yourself or ask me to advise you some links.

[Ian_Spliffy]

Download Adobe Dreamweaver (CS3 or CS4)

Torrents are a nice place to find it for free for your use only but please think about paying if you are using it a lot.

normal sites can be done in about 2 hours and look quite good.
Id send you a basic DIV layout but arent on my web-dev machine ATM.

PM me when you have a few spare hours and ill try sending you an old site of mine for the basic layout and ill help you along the way.

[noodle]

Are you just after putting up an ecommerce site? If you are, take a look at oscommerce. Its a completely free ecommerce package that connects up to things like PayPal, its very popular and looks the dogs.

Failing that, things like Joomla could be quite good for you. Its a content management system, quite a few places use it for online stores etc.

Unless you have experience in building sites or have a lot of free time, then I dont think putting one together by hand is so cool, start off with something like the above first and go from there.

[BL4K3Y]

I do an ICT course at college and we use a website called www.wix.com in our web design class. It is based on flash I think and it is very easy to use. Their are lots of templates to choose from and you can add, remove and edit everything on them.

[Chodna]

For a truly professional site, you would make it from the ground up. get yourself a good editor which has syntax highlighting. Dreamweaver is very good for beginners as it is a WYSIWGY editor.

For flashy gallaries look into JQuery. All you shall need to do is copy paste some code and tweak it here and there to get it to look like what you want.

Also look at getting a template if you don't want to make it from scratch.

[Crash'N'Burn]

TBH you should use dreamweaver! there is a lot of features to do (forms, pop up boxes etc) If your wanting something in perticular, find a template based around what you want (Make sure its copywrite free) and then edit as you wish, add your own pictures, text etc!! You should use dreamweaver MX2004 for beginners or for advanced you should use either CS4 or CS3..

[Sage]

for clean code / good support for design, Dreamweaver probably is the best.