n2rock.com- need some ideas

Church- way over my head!!! LOL

The html- I picked up a template from a freebie site. I don't have the time, skill or knowledge for anything more than that.

Blog- not a chance. I don't read blogs, and sure as hell am not going to take the time to write one.

CMS CSS anchors tables... What language are you speaking

jkdrone wrote:

You could prolly spiffy it up all easy like by installing a good CMS, like drupal, and take all of the work of writing the HTML and such off of your hands. Just work the menus/modules, and do a little CSS hackery (or download a theme).

So I'm wondering what the hell CMS and Drupal are. And I find a review that states:

Keep in mind they are by far not simple; you get what you work for. If you’re looking for something simple, it’s likely that these are not for you.

There is, a bit of a learning curve when it comes to using a CMS; understanding the data structure (ie. sections, categories, content) is usually the largest obstacle to overcome.


Nope- I have enough going on in my life. Not interested in learning CMS. Best I can do is download a pre-made template and go from there (FYI- I'm using NVU for editing. Which is a step up for me, considering the only other experience I have is with Frontpage

N2rock wrote:

So I'm wondering what the hell CMS and Drupal are. And I find a review that states:

Keep in mind they are by far not simple; you get what you work for. If you’re looking for something simple, it’s likely that these are not for you.

There is, a bit of a learning curve when it comes to using a CMS; understanding the data structure (ie. sections, categories, content) is usually the largest obstacle to overcome.


Nope- I have enough going on in my life. Not interested in learning CMS. Best I can do is download a pre-made template and go from there (FYI- I'm using NVU for editing. Which is a step up for me,

I think you're getting smoke blown up your ***. Drupal is insanely easy. It's hard to understand the difference between a category, a book, a page? Huh? Srsly.

Your hoster can probably install the software through the cpanel with you just clicking a button. You can skin it as easily as choosing which one of the hundreds you like, downloading it, unzipping it, and ftp'ing it up to a specific directory.

Then, you're effectively done. You want a photo gallery? There's a module for that. Yes, it requires some effort to set it up, but it's a lot easier than crafting one by hand in HTML. Oh, did I mention there are WYSIWIG editor modules for most CMSes? No need to know html...

Well, you can take that person's word for it, and keep having to download html templates from someone, hand-edit them, and try to do your layout that way. =)

!c

Here ya go... http://php.opensourcecms.com/scripts/details.php?scriptid=9

!c

I say, let Church do it for you. He might as well be speaking Greek. By the sounds of it, it will take him all of about 3 minutes.

Lol, to be clear - I'm just trying to suggest getting yourself out of the business of writing html, if you can, and focus on the cool content you could add instead. Sure, a CMS (content management system), or even blog software (without being a 'blogger', wordpress for example can do everything your site currently has without your writing one tiny line of html - it manages content, pages, searching, layout, etc.) takes a little bit of getting used to and setting up. However, once you've done that - you never have to think about those things or html again, you just write down what you want to say, upload photos you want to upload, etc.

And, trust me, if you don't know CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and don't want to know it, you really shouldn't try doing everything in html - as that's what drives the look and feel of your web page. =)

!c

TxCrawler wrote:

I say, let Church do it for you. He might as well be speaking Greek. By the sounds of it, it will take him all of about 3 minutes.

I'm with you!

jkdrone wrote:

Your hoster can probably install the software through the cpanel with you just clicking a button.

My hoster is my office. The company gave me space. But I can't ask for anyone to put any effort into it.

jkdrone wrote:

Drop the splash page, that's 1990's.

Agreed on that, for sure

Quote :

Drop the tables in favor of CSS. (See the source of http://www.dronecolony.com/2008/ - 17 lines of html!)

Yeah, but 547 lines of CSS and 3,350 lines of JavaScript.

Personally, I agree that CSS is definitely the more...professional way to go. The right way, so to speak. You can offer multiple styles and decide to change up the entire look of the site without touching your content. Browsers that don't support it will still deliver the content, and mobile browsers will be able to access it properly, too. It's good stuff.

I'm not sure that a basic WYSIWYG editor isn't a better choice for this particular application, though, unless you're going to do the work for him. I mean, if you don't know what CSS stands for, you're going to have a hard time learning it.

Well, my suggestion will always remain to not try re-inventing the wheel, and to not code your web pages by hand (whether editing a template, etc.)

But, but to your original question - I've consulted more than a few people on this subject (or rather, similar ones), and my first question is always "why do you want a website?"

That is, what are you trying to achieve?

If you want to share information about your family, and your interests, I'd have things like a family photo album, a family tree, etc. Adding more than just pictures of your jeep - but stories about trips you took, things you learned on the way, great new people you met. (i.e., just like what you post on the forums.) The reason a blog helps with that kind of thing is to let you write a story and focus on the content rather than the mark-up, isolate it from the other stories, and make it easily organizable and search-able. I judge from your response about blogs that you've developed a particular notion about them. I'm not sure that notion completely matches all of their uses =)

!c

Deacon wrote:

Yeah, but 547 lines of CSS and 3,350 lines of JavaScript.

Aww, you had to go there =) that 547 lines of CSS supports every page on the site. The javascript? Yes, that's a common, public library that's used almost everywhere these days. Admittedly, since I took a few pages away from the site even the inclusion of that library is spurrious. The actual js written to support my functions (loading pages and obfuscating email adresses, you'll note is just 11 lines.)

deacon wrote:

Personally, I agree that CSS is definitely the more...professional way to go. The right way, so to speak. You can offer multiple styles and decide to change up the entire look of the site without touching your content. Browsers that don't support it will still deliver the content, and mobile browsers will be able to access it properly, too. It's good stuff.

Well, since we're going to open this can of worms, it's not a matter of being "professional," it's a matter of coding to spec. HTML is only for defining structure, meaning, including non-textual data types, and cross-document referencing. CSS is _specifically_ for controlling look-and-feel. The additions to HTML to control things like coloring and alignment were much aligned and difficultly put-through the W3C as they strove to complete specs like CSS when the browser world went graphic. In 1993, it wasn't a big deal because we were mostly using lynx on unix shells. Once we all had enough bandwidth to support graphics, the game got muddy. Nowadays, we still have people using tables for layout control.

Now, that doesn't mean I was in any way attempting to deride him for not using the mark-up language for what it was designed for. See my comment below...

Deacon wrote:

I'm not sure that a basic WYSIWYG editor isn't a better choice for this particular application, though, unless you're going to do the work for him. I mean, if you don't know what CSS stands for, you're going to have a hard time learning it.

Admittedly, my at least half of my comments were tongue-in-cheek. (I thought that would've been slightly obvious, but it appears now it wasn't =)

!c

I like cheese!

terrahawk wrote:

I like cheese!

I'm with you :youtheman:

terrahawk wrote:

I like cheese!

First post I have understood in sometime on this thread! Too many intellectual cats for my tastes.

dude church, really?


AC/DC makes good music there something people can understnd

MudHound wrote:

dude church, really?


AC/DC makes good music there something people can understnd

Classic rock, always a good wheeling choice. AC/DC gets their props from me but they aren't my favorite. I am a Styx FREAK and Def Leppard, Sammy Hagar, Journey, Aqua, Eddie Money, Ratt, Kenny Loggins, Billy Idol, Rick Astley, etc. love that stuff!

dude! is the George????