Be Excellent To Each Other

This worldwide crisis means work is really slow lately, so my boss wants me to make 2 websites. One for the company and another for the discipline he lectures at the university. Since i know shit about HTML, i wanted to know a good and easy way to make some near-professional looking stuff. It has to include a forum.

Use Microsoft word to do it. Some people will say no, but they are nooBs and not 1337 like me.

Buy a template:

http://allwebco-templates.com/

Those guys do some nice ones and the bonus is that they don't need flash or gubbins to customise them. At the simplest level all you need is a paint package and notepad.

not an option. It's mandatory that i don't spend even one cent. I know people who could a professional looking one, but my boss is being cheap

FFS, they cost next to nothing and save far more time than they cost. You literally halve the development time.

Go and kick him in the nuts.

If it's a website where it's going to have information on it coming from him (or other people) in the future, the best idea is to use a CMS (content management) system - then nobody needs to know HTML, and you won't get lumbered with updating stuff. You may need to do a little CSS tinkering to get it looking how you want though - and there seems to be no WYSIWYG way of doing that as I know.

Some of those CMSs include an integrated forum (not usually as complex as this one (PHPBB) but possibly good enough)


I use a very simple one called RazorCMS for a few simple sites, only takes 5 minutes to set up and it doesn't require messing about with databases - http://www.razorcms.co.uk/


You could consider using InvisionFree for the forum. If you have hosting provided by the company anyway (i.e. not paying extra for it) just install phpbb or whatever.

that was what the person who i was thinking about hiring said he would do. Seriously, i think i'm going to call my boss. If he thinks doing the company website on Ning is a good idea he needs medical help.

Dreamweaver?

Torrent it maybe?

Well to be fair, it is dead easy to install and configure most of these CMS things, no specialist needed. I've played about with several before arriving at that simple one mentioned above.

And if you choose something which has some good templates / skins already, you can get away with a fairly professional looking website in minutes.

It becomes difficult if he starts being picky about things which aren't easy to change, or if there is nobody putting time into providing the content and keeping it up to date.

I'd say give it a try yourself first, if his expectations are totally unrealistic then at least you have demonstrated the level that "free" stops at.

i'll try. Do you know any place with good free templates?

And what's the recommended razorCMS pack?

Have a look here: http://php.opensourcecms.com/scripts/sh ... %20Portals

The demos usually allow you to choose a template, and you can see how easy / configurable (or not) everything is.


CMS Made Simple is a good one for having lots of themes, I seem to remember.


You mean the themes?
http://www.razorcms.co.uk/theme-blade-packs.htm
Just install anything you like the look of and then click them in and out from the control panel as you want. Usually it's easy to slightly adjust the header to contain the company logo or whatever.

If your boss isn't willing to spend a penny on something so important as a website, and is entrusting someone who admits he knows fuck all about it, then he's a fucking moron.

Why are there still people in business who don't take the internet seriously?

my boss isn't serious about anything. He's quite eccentric to say the least. He did some crazy stuff like inviting actors to his classes pretending they were students with some serious issues just to have fun.

Jesus. Um, beside telling your boss to pay someone some money to do this (and if he thinks professionals are expensive, tell him to wait until he tries hiring an amateur), I think you're going to have to use a template. They really are very cheap.

Plus, even you get a template for free, the hosting for it won't be.

In a real pinch you could use the Google page creator thing. It lets you allow collaboration and has a bunch of widgets you might find useful. You can also point your registered domain to it.

what do you people think of dreamweaver? Is it a good option?

I use it all the time for work but just as a code editor really and for the team collaboration aspects of it. It does have some templates included that will get you off to a good start but you'll soon hit a brick wall if you don't want to delve into the code.

I used to use it, but the code it spits out makes me cry.
However, as you don't really care about that, then it's fine. But it would cost more than getting someone to do this for you.

Wordpress!!!!!!11

well, i'm probably going to do one in google pages, until i have some time for an advanced solution.

do you know if its possible to have a forum on Google sites? i can't seem to find any help on that

I've only looked at the google page thing briefly, I haven't actually tried this so you'll have to check it out for yourself but there's google groups. Here's the one for the Google Page Creator:

http://groups.google.com/group/GPCDiscussionGroup

You could set one of those up and link to it from your site, you could probably pull in the latest posts somehow as well.

It is not possible - other people have asked and been told "no". Groups may be an option, but bugger is it nasty.
Free forums are available elsewhere on the web, but they'll have adverts and may not be that well-featured (you'll remember that WoS didn't really have a search, for example). If it comes to it, I can host one for you for cheap.

thanks, but like i said i have got orders not to spend one cent. This forum doesn't have to be fancy, but a search button is certainly a must (unless almost no one uses it). It's for students to ask questions about this discipline.

Just been having a play around with Google Sites as it's now called. There's a good set of tools and a fair bit of flexibility too, colour me quite impressed.

As Grim... says the groups thing isn't up to much as a forum but it might be ok for your limited purpose.

well, i could just do one in Invisionfree or Zetaboards and link it.

No search, remember? And it's covered in adverts.

And you've got to pay £2 (BANG! - Ed)

I've installed Drupal as i heard good things about it. Still messing with it, but at least includes a forum.

It's complicated stuff, but you'll find you don't need to understand 90% of it anyway. Good luck!

do you think it's better to use Drupal (or any other CMS) or the rv sitebuilder provided wby the hosting?

Just use Wordpress, man. It's incredibly tard-friendly and completely customisable. I don't know why anyone would use other CMSes such as Joomla or whatever when WP is so simple. Drupal, I've never used or frankly heard of, which I'm going to use as a sign that it isn't as good as Wordpress.

Even I can use Wordpress, even though I choose not to. Ho hum.

Drupal has a builtin forum though, which I think was one of the initial criteria.

Wordpress does look lovely and seems easy to use, but am I correct in thinking it's fairly specifically aimed towards blogs and "publishing" sites rather than your more traditional, fairly static website?

For example, if I want a main page with an introduction, and some sub pages about stuff, and a menu at the top or side to navigate with, how easy is that with WP?

Piece of piss. That said, WP's underlying structure doesn't really fit terribly well with large static sites.

That's what I was concerned about Do you know any examples where it's used like that? - at the moment I use a CMS called RazorCMS for a few sites. It's "OK" but it's developed by one guy and I'm getting a few niggly problems that probably wouldn't be there on a more widely used thing like WP.

Umm.. wouldn't uptojump meet that criteria?

It would, but only because we're not updating it as much as would be nice :0)

Well, not really. The menus there get you a list of articles with the relevant tag. Just like a blog, which is how most WP sites I've seen look too, and is doubtless how it's meant to be used.

Ah, ok. I use Joomla for my site and articles are placed into categories with the menus pointing at specific categories or articles. Not that I've written much or added anything in ages.

Drupal is a bit overwhelming really. I still don't know how to make a working website. I installed the drupal script through my webhost, and it went to adductio.pt/drupal ,when i tipe adductio.pt . I want it to be on the root, without dragging the folders to it. Besides, when going to adductio.pt/drupal, what appears is not what looks like a regular website, but just a site construction tool.

Try that:
http://www.wanderings.net/notebook/Main ... tDirectory

Many CMSs have an admin / setup page which appears first until you've configured it and then it gets deleted and you see the real site.

All you do is create a page and then link to it. If you look at Cult of Mac, we have both types of nav there. On the left, the 'article types' (News, Reviews, Opinions, How-tos) return a list of articles based on category; on the right, About and Advertising link to static pages. If you were creating a strictly static site in WP, you'd just create a nav menu with the second type of link.