Handy Tools for Making a Site: Round One
So you’re wanting to make a website for your RPG? That’s great. Now for those who haven’t made a website before, the task can be a bit daunting. Where do you start?
Now this documentation is not going to teach you how to write HTML. Instead this specific one is the first of a series, helping you gather together a variety of things that will help you make your website. Much like when it comes to cooking, where you need to gather together your bowls etc before you start cooking, this will help you gather together software that makes the whole process much easier.
Hosting
If you’re willing to shell out cold, hard cash to host your website (and the game’s forums as well) then my recommendation is Site5. I’ve been hosted with them for almost a year now and everything’s been great.
But if you’re just wanting the one site, your best bet would be a free host. Sick of ads? Then visit Get What You Give, a site where people with excess space offer it up for free. No ads!
HTML Editors
Now, you can write HTML in ordinary Notepad, but there are other, better ones available. Writing HTML is made much easier when your editor highlights all the different bits - it makes it much easier to see where your errors are.
My favourite HTML editor is Notepad++, which highlights the different parts of my code. Works for HTML, CSS, PHP and all sorts of other acronyms - plus is an excellent regular text editor.
Other HTML editors include: NVU, Bluefish and Seamonkey.
Graphics
You want your site to look pretty, right? If you can’t afford Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, then I have only one program to suggest: the GIMP. Right from the start it does most of the things that Photoshop does (and with plugins does pretty much everything else) all for the low, low price of NOTHING. That’s right absolutely nothing.
Browsers
While most of the Internet still uses Internet Explorer there are many more that use alternatives - and of course, Internet Explorer does not render pages correctly and suffers from many bugs. When designing, it is always best to test your site in many different browsers: I recommend both Firefox and Opera. On top of that, you can use a program like Multiple IE to check how your site looks in different versions of Internet Explorer. How’s that for neat?
FTP
FTP, or File Transfer Protocol, is a protocol that transfers files from one computer to another. An FTP client is a piece of software that easily transfers your files from your computer to your server (where your website is hosted).
My recommendation for this is Filezilla, but other clients include CoreFTP and SmartFTP.
Local Web Servers
If you are just going to be writing basic HTML and CSS, then you can just skip this section entirely. But if you are going to be working in PHP/MySQL - even if it is just PHP includes - then you are going to need a local server on your computer while you are working.
In this case, I have only one recommendation: XAMPP.
And that is it for this section, I’m afraid. Consider this like cooking, and I have just helped you get your bowls, your measuring cups, your spoons etc together so you can start mixing your ingrediants together. in my next stage, I am not going to teach you how to write HTML, but instead give you more resources and links to go beyond the basics, as well as more tools to make things easier.
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I am using XAMPP and MultipleIEs, too. Least is a fantstic solution to have a look at your design in IE 6 and lower without having to reinstall it on the system. For coding I stick to the plain notepad, although I recently downloaded PSPad.