help with web designing alpossmar82: Most web designers start out by copying out script on paper, some programmers have the good memory no need to copy. Text editor HTML vs Dreamweaver. Geoff: In what way do you need help? Is it in the design of the page (the layout, conceptualising the user interface) or with the actual construction of the page? Is it a static page or do you intend to have dynamic elements? sweet jenifer: i want let people post their recorded voices in mp3 and mp4 so first i want to tell my concept behind the website .. my website wll be for music lovers and for shower singers i wanted to let people post their recorded voice on my website as competition i wll choose five winners and publish their name on my website .... like that i want to do i dont know how to do this but i created something which is on freemysinger.com Geoff: Right - so you want multimedia development. I'd like to point out that Wireclub doesn't even do animated GIFs. You're going to need a developer to work with you on your idea. And you developer who is goig to have to do a hell of a lot of work is either going to want paying up front, or a sizeable stake in the business - and that's only if they believe in you. sweet jenifer: yes u r right ....rest is tragedy ... i will hire a designer .... next question is how to get the audience to my website (Edited by sweet jenifer) Geoff: lol - That's the $64,000 question. SEO is the start, make sure the site is built in a way that the spiders can understand what each page is about - that's THE most important aspect of passive-SEO. Then you need to promote it - blogs and bloggers are two important routes; you need to market to your unique selling point so that the blogs have something to talk about. Social marketing; get it out there on every possible social network that will allow links back to your site. Get interactive with other people on social media and they will start promoting your site for you. Paid advertising. This can be VERY expensive, but it's a quick route to traffic, especially if you are careful about the balance between which keywords you pay for and what you pay for them. Geoff: Unfortunately, building a following that promotes your site on social media will take either time or a stroke of genius (or luck) to create something viral. Geoff: Wordpress is quite good. It's pretty flexible with all the plugins you can get, it's relatively easy to use. The software itself is free as are many of the plugins, and through the wordpress.com site you can get your own website set up completely free. It is, however, a bit restrictive. In order to get the most out of it you have to really work at it. It's prone to bloat (loading a lot of stuff, styles, scripts, etc - that you really don't need, slowing down page load times - although saying that, it's not half as bad as Joomla). You can easily succumb to conflicts in plugins. For me, the biggest drawback in Wordpress is having to do things Wordpress's way. Even using the plugins that make Wordpress more SEO friendly, it's very laborious to build websites that truly maximise their SEO potential. There's also the drawback that if you want a very simple addition that's not available as a plugin, it's about twice as much to build a short script to do what you want as you have to integrate it to Wordpress' own systems. Short answer - Yes, Wordpress is fine. Long answer - Yes, Wordpress is fine until you need something more. And that's based on the fact that part of my job involves building custom themes and plugins for Wordpress. In fact that's what I am going to be doing today. StephyLee: Do you know a good website that allows me to test out my html, php, css script? I'm new to web designing. StephyLee: I'm trying out CodePen now, but I don't think it works for php. It only reads html, css, js. StephyLee: I'm currently taking a pho course now. So it would be neat to test out my script on an actual website. Geoff: Sorry, I shouldn't post late at night, http://sandbox.onlinephpfunctions.com/ You won't be able to run complete PHP scripts though a sandbox, but you can test functions. Your best bet for training would be to find a cheap / free webhost, or to install Apache, MySQL, and PHP on your own computer and turn it into a sandbox server StephyLee: Thanks for you help. I tried http://sandbox.onlinephpfunctions.com/ it works, but it couldn't execute lines with html tags. I guess installing Apache, php, mysql is the only way. Thanks. Geoff: XAMPP is just an Apache, MySQL and PHP package for multiple platforms. It also includes PERL. Geoff: The biggest benefit of XAMPP (aside from being free) is that it's ridiculously easy to install, especially compared to individually installing AMP on anything other than Linux. StephyLee: Some of the job postings are looking for someone who knows Wordpress. Are they referring to Wordpress.com or Wordpress.org? Geoff: I would imagine that they are referring to the CMS itself. Familiarity with building themes and plugins for Wordpress; which is all PHP - so it's just a question of getting used to the functions and hooks in the code. http://codex.wordpress.org/ has a good crash course in the basics. | Technology Chat Room Similar Conversations |