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How To Make A Website With Free Software. |
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Written by Lucas Heijn
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Tuesday, 05 August 2008 06:41 |
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Making a website is not as difficult as many people think. Today you are able to download free software that makes it possible for anyone that wants to, to create a Web Site.
by LucasHeijn
Making a website is not as difficult as many people think. Today you are able to download free software that makes it possible for anyone that wants to, to create a Web Site.
There was a time that you would need to know HTML to build a web site. Today you don?t need to have any knowledge of HTML and you will still be able to build a great looking site. Having some knowledge of HTML can be an advantage, but without it you will still be able to create that site.
There are programs such as Dreamweaver and Microsoft Front Page which are wysiwyg. They can be quite expensive. There are also free open source software products that would rival Dreamweaver and others in their site creation capabilities. Open source software is created by a worldwide community of programmers. Most of this software is powerful and is becoming easier to use.
This free software is called NVU (Pronounced N-View) Just search Google for NVU and choose which download you need. Linux, Windows, or Mac.
How To Use NVU
Let?s look at using NVU. NVU is WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get). It looks much like any word processor program but it does not work like one.
One of the main problems you face is how to place text and images where you want them. Like all things they are easy once you know how. In this article we are going to concentrate on how to put things where you want them to appear.
As I said earlier, the screen looks just like a word processor. The text features work the same as in a word processor. You can choose the font, size, bold it and all the things you can do in a word Microsoft Word.
The key to achieving this is tables. It is by means of tables that you will be able to place objects where you need them on a web page. You will find that if you import an image and then want text next to it, the text carries on from the image as though the image was just part of the line of text. To overcome this you need to create a table with 2 columns. In one column you place the image and in the other you place the text.
You can also create tables inside tables. This will allow you to create a box inside a table. The background color can be set for each table and even per column. You can set the width of a table by pixels or by percent. If you created a table that was 70% and the centered it it will be 70% of the width of the table it was created into.
You can look at tables as the building blocks of the web page. These building blocks will allow you to set out your page to look as you want it to. Many of these blocks need to be invisible so that only the objects are seen and not what holds them there. You can do this by specifying the border as zero. This will mean that you table will not be seen.
Mastering this will make it possible for you to create a professional looking site. From here much of the program is like any other and you will soon master the use of it with a little experimentation. Understanding how NVU works is also a lesson in Dreamweaver or Microsoft Front Page as these programs work much the same.
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