Creating a website is a scary proposition. After surfing the net and seeing so many professional and eyecatching sites, it makes you hesitate a bit. Don't. There are resources all over the net to help you put together a website of your own.
What follows here is a listing of some of the places and people I've found helpful in putting together (and constantly changing, lol) this website of mine. The words in italic are the choices I've made in each category:
Freeservers*
There are hundreds of webhosts out there looking to host your prospective website. It used to be that free sites meant popups and ads. But that's not necessarily true anymore. Do a google search for free webhosting and check them out. A free site is a good place to practice with as you learn html and play around with how you want your site to look.
Coffeecup FTP*
Webhosts all have different interfaces for working with your uploaded files. Some are simple and some are complicated. But most involve a lot more work than is necessary. A good ftp program will allow you to create/edit your webpages on your computer and then just upload them directly to your website. The larger your website grows, the more you'll bless such a capability. Look around; there are a lot of good free ftp programs (such as Brandyware's FreeFTP ) They're simple to learn and use.
Paint Shop Pro*, Photoshop
Corel's Paint Shop Pro was one of my first (and best) investments toward setting up a webpage. It's simple and user-friendly and there are hundreds of tutorials out there on the web to help you learn the ropes. It runs about $80.00 (unless you grab a copy off ebay for lots less).
Adobe's Photoshop is a very expensive but equally wonderful graphics editing program. Designed more for the very serious graphics student, there are also hundreds of tutorials out there to learn it as well. Photoshop costs about $650 (unless you have an educational discount, which helps alot).
Edited* There is a free program called The Gimp that is available for creating graphics. Much like Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop, it is gathering a lot of users and more tutorials for learning to use it are available on the net everyday. Give it a try as well.
PowerDVD, VLC*
A screencapping program is a must if you want to have some variety to the images you use on your site. It gets tiresome after a while constantly searching for nice quality pictures to use. So why not use your own? VLC is a free media player that allows you to grab screencaps from most common video file types. I used to use PowerDVD alone, but now I use VLC for large bunches of screencaps. It will allow you to grab multiple screencaps with one setting. (Go here if you want to know how)
Edited*If you're looking for General Hospital Screencaps, take a look at my SCREENCAP SITE.
Frontpage, Dreamweaver*
I began creating webpages with Microsoft Frontpage because it came included on some Office software I bought. Frontpage is considered a WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get)- meaning, you kinda just drag and drop stuff into place on the page and let Frontpage worry about the html coding. But editors like that (and especially Frontpage) add a lot of unnecessary coding to webpages, making the page size in kb larger than it needs to be. So I switched to Dreamweaver.
There are lots of free html editors out there, including the wysiwyg kind. (Nvu is a free Html editor) Do a google search for others. But also learn some html while you're using them. You'll be glad you did.
Internet tutorials are probably the greatest resource out there on the net today. They are written by wonderfully generous people who want to share their secrets as they teach you to use programs like Paint Shop or Dreamweaver, etc. They want you to use their tutorials to create wonderful graphics of your own. All they ask is that you give them a bit of credit. (You'll understand how important that is when your own website is up and running and you keep seeing your graphics and stuff all around with no credit to you, lol).
Many of my favorite sites are full of tutorials, most of which I never try. But the tutorial writers are generally friendly, open people who don't mind answering questions about their work. They make it easy to pick up techniques here and there.
The majority of my icons have been made following tutorials. There's no shame in that. It's why the authors put them out there - to use. I've learned to use them as guidelines and to experiment here and there. So here are the tutorials I've used, in case you want to try some yourself.
If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a line. I'll be glad to try and help.
jrsgirln 2007