Website Design

[DoorM4n]

Hey Guys!

I have a question: What is the best tool and best code to use when making a website that will need to be updated many times a day? I am looking to make a website, and I want to know where to start and what the best things are to use.

Thanks!

[OwnZ joO]

Probably some sort of content management system like, Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, DotNetNuke or any others that you have access to. They pretty much take care of the website for you and all you have to deal with is the content.

[DoorM4n]

Thanks man! I appreciate the help. I'm going to look up some of those programs. I have dreamweaver, do you think that will be as good as those?

[neodos]

Well it really depends on what type of website you want to make?
You can either use CMS such as these Ownz pointed out, which are very complete have all sorts of modules, blog,news,user interfaces... or you can learn html and css and design all from nothing and eventually php and java script for interactivity.

It really depends on the type of website you want to make and if you have the time to learn html/css otherwise go for using a CMS.

[DoorM4n]

Between CMS and html, which one would load more quickly? Or does that depend on what is on the website?

[neodos]

Probably a website you code all by yourself, though its wouldn't really load much faster than any other CMS.

[OwnZ joO]

A static HTML page will load faster than a dynamic page created by a CMS, although there are some CMS extensions that support caching for certain pages that will not change. If you don't have many users it probably wont matter though, or if you have a good server.

[DoorM4n]

Okay, lets say I have millions of viewers a week and need to edit the page over 100 times a day--a little extreme, I know--and I need it to load lightning fast everytime I loaded it. What code should I use and what program do you guys recommend now?

[OwnZ joO]

Static html content will pretty much always be as fast or faster than CMS stuff because with a CMS it stores it all in databases and dynamically creates the site for each page based on the user logged in. If no user specific content will be on a page then you can set those to cache on some of the pages, which will basically make it to be static content because it's cached. If you use a nice html editor then you can edit it as much as you want and it will probably be simple, I don't really know of any because I just write any html I need by hand.

[DoorM4n]

I see, well thanks for the info Ownz! I've been looking into CSS and HTML and messing with it through Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is absolutely godly, hah. How did you guys learn so much about web design?

[Dragonfire]

Hey DoorM4n, you still doing this?

[kronosslayer]

I use a program call notepad++ which is just text editor with syntax highlighting. Without any tools except that and my brain, the result is this Clan Website which I gained from books. (Still being worked on ).
It's been a while since i've been here, how've y'all been?

[Dragonfire]

I use Dreamweaver CS5.5 for my coding, it's nice to have DW fill in the necessary server-side code for me, kind of like that, but I do have to edit it for my liking. My result right now it my church's website and it still keeps internally updated, I just recently made my admin login, and also modified the news pages to be dynamically loaded from a database in which I can submit news to via submission form. So no static coding on that front

Now I need a new web design project, lol.

EDIT:

Hey kronos, I like the website you have there, very smooth and simplistic, one bit of advice, on your Community tab there (or anywhere, really), when you have a link that navigates to an external site, such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. it's a really good thing to use the target="_blank" in your anchor links to redirect them to a new tab/window, this way the visitor is NOT pulled away from your site, but rather is just presented with another one.

Also I noticed that your navigation menu is done by JavaScript and also normal HTML. Is there a reason it's not done completely by either or, kind of looks like you took the template or menu from another source, then just manually added in your extra links. I do like the navigation, actually you could achieve the whole thing without JavaScript, too, ya know?

And none of those JavaScript link are working either...

We all have website bugs man, just giving ya some info.

[kronosslayer]

Yeah that "Javascript Panel" wasn't planned very well and almost thrown together because i'm so limited when it comes to my knowledge on javascript. By the way, the links do work, but my games page doesn't do anything at the moment.

About that navigation bar at the top, I actually used Divine Knights Clan flash navigation bar as inspiration. I felt it was a good darker themed element anyways.

One thing I must say Dragonfire is you definitely have the ability to fill a webpage with content, and navigation elements well.

Thanks for the critiques!

[Dragonfire]

Thanks kronos for the compliment. You should see my original website, hehe, I did a whole re-design.

That Divine Knights is one sick site, way too much flash for my likes though, sadly I could prolly almost accomplish the same thing through some fancy css stuff. Believe me, I know how to go fancy now, but IMHO, I 100% flash site not good, especially considering how flash is slowly fading with the release and implanation of HTML5 based web coding.

[OwnZ joO]

If you are looking to slap together a website I really recommend Bootstrap from Twitter. It makes a good looking site that is friendly to tablets and mobile phones come together really nicely and they have lots of examples to help you out.

[kronosslayer]

If you are looking to slap together a website I really recommend Bootstrap from Twitter. It makes a good looking site that is friendly to tablets and mobile phones come together really nicely and they have lots of examples to help you out.

I've never bothered to look into that. I shall try it someday!

I did take a more professional approach to my permanent theme. If anyone is interested, here's the link Reclaimers

[Dragonfire]

I kinda liked your black theme...

[kronosslayer]

Fear Not! I'm not completely removing that theme. just added a theme selection widget in the footer of my site. It still needs functionality but will bring that glossy black!

[Dragonfire]

Looks like you still have a quite a bit to do...

So DoorM4n, any more news on that site?

[DoorM4n]

kill the bot!

~XZ~ Done

[Dragonfire]

Thinking about learning some AJAX, but I'm not exactly sure what I would use it for...

Also trying to figure out how to make a good dynamic calendar...hmm...

[DoorM4n]

Hey Dragon, as I shed my final's skin within the next week or two, I'll update you on the website stuff.

[OwnZ joO]

Thinking about learning some AJAX, but I'm not exactly sure what I would use it for...

Also trying to figure out how to make a good dynamic calendar...hmm...

You could use it to call some type of web service or rss feed to populate a part of your web page. Ajax is basically just making some type of http call using javascript(JA) without causing the page to lock(Asynchronus - A) and then updating a piece of the page without reloading the whole thing. It can be used for a lot more than that, requesting stuff on your web server, but if you don't know how or want to set one up then you could just slap some javascript on a page and call a webservice using an Ajax call.

[Dragonfire]

I've found that it is commonly used for the point of making your own database if you can't have access to like a MySQL one.

Oh, and using MySQL to me is much less code...

And I did find a good simple dynamic calendar, I just need to find out how to modify it so that I can uase it to what I want.