HTML website

[milavidal]

So, I was thinking of putting up a website, but at the moment, I can't afford to go with FLASH. My brother did buy me the flash program so that I could work on it but what was I thinking? I just can't do it, it's not easy Anyway, I'd like to re-route and go with an html one. I'd love it if it could at least play songs but i am not sure if that's even possible. Does anyone know of any websites I could go through?

[EDIT] Anyone interested in building a Flash website for me? It really does not need to be all fancy, just simple. Or even if anyone's willing to teach me how to do something in Flash for a not so expensive fee?

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[Rhys]

I use website baker on my server. YOu might be able to use it on a Mac to design the site. There are loads of free website design programs. Even word will do that!

[milavidal]

pardon my ignorance, what is your website address?

[Rachelsne]

becareful using music- unless it is library music specifically for the purpouse of free use you may be violating copyrights by using it.

Also it seems a general view on here that customers dont care about the music.

As for your technical questions...No Idea, I have a website I am building using cpanel and It certainly is a learning experience-I have no idea what I am doing!

[Rhys]

Music kills dial-up connections. I always have my speakers set to off. Music and flash are two things that turn me rapidly away from a site. Mine is 100% non flash. I did try flash but hated it.

[Alpha]

Who cares about dial-up users. If you can't afford high speed internet then you can't afford my rates anyway.

[Rhys]

Who cares about dial-up users. If you can't afford high speed internet then you can't afford my rates anyway.

Not so. Many people use dial-up purely because they can dial up from anywhere. My wife has a dial-up Verizon card in her laptop.

[Tyjax]

You may need to evaluate your attachment to designing the site in Flash. It IS difficult. If my client insists on the bells and whistles of flash my rate nearly triples. It is difficult to maintain. i.e. update and keep fresh. It is slow as hell. It really irritates if there is lots of booga booga going on. As to bandwidth. Depends on your market penetration and target audience. Look at bandwidth/highband in your target audience. The figures are out there. Likely something in the neighborhood of 30 percent don't have highband.

As to the acctual question you asked. Look for a framework/cms system that will allow you to use preplugged templates and easily keep your site fresh.

+industry secret alert+ Rachael you may want to look at this too...
www.modxcms.com A little setup at the start. Learn the system. Tons of premade look/feel templates. Tons of flexibility. Moderately difficult to get running. All of my proffesional clients are built on this.

Other option is to look for a premade HTML template. Preferably with some good solid CSS floating type columns that you can then adjust easily.

Let me know if I can assist either of you with any issues.

rachaelsne, if you are trying to build the website using JUST the tools given to you in most cpanel installations you may be frustrated a bit. If the cpanel installation gives you some preinstalled scripts you can implement you will be alot further down the road.

[Alpha]

And unless you have an HTML mirror with a robots redirect (for search engines), flash will kill your search engine ranking unless you're in an extremely niche market or you're a multinational corporation.

[RyanMillerPhoto]

Spend US$300 on Adobe Lightroom and have it create the flash slide shows for you! You just grab the code and place into your html. Should take you less than a week to perfect it.

The rest of the site in html is fine. In addition an entirely flash website can be quite annoying!

[pm63]

Set up a CMS (Content Management System) such as WordPress or Joomla on your server:

http://wordpress.org

http://joomla.org

[Mike30D]

You can get flash templates from FlashPalette and the cheaper ones are still pretty nice. The one for $66 is good to start out with, it has a desktop editor that you download and it's REAL easy to use. Support is top notch too, and you can host with whoever you want. They have some more expensive ones when you are ready to move up. They also come with splash pages so the search engines will find you. All their templates are for photographers and nothing else. Some day I hope to get one from BigFolio, but for now these will work. Check them out at http://www.flashpalette.com

[mmcduffie1]

I'd stay away from music and flash all together. (flash is the armpit of the web) A lot of people still use crappy internet connections and music will slow down your page. The slower it loads the less visits you get. People just won't wait.

Personally i'd go with PHP as you can tell from my website www.colorcrayon.com

KISS is my mantra ... keep it simple stupid (my old boss used to say that all the time)

I would be more than happy to offer some C&C on your site once you get it up. I am a much better webmaster than I am a photog