Want to develop a domain into a site, never done it before, adivice needed??

[chamac]

I have a site hosted at Bluehost, have never had any problems with them.
I am hosting my own domain and am using Wordpress for the blog. There was no cost to do so.

 

[Area52]

Unless you have the money to pay someone else, you will need to learn the basic language to build web pages.
That information is readily available on the web. The following site is by no means the only source, but a good one.

Html (Hypertext Markup Language)
Older markup version but still widely used and understood by current browsers
http://www.w3schools.com/HTML/default.asp

Xhtml (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language)
Latest html version. Most new page design is with this version.
http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/

Once you learn html and/or xhtml move on to CSS

CSS (Cascading Style Sheet)
Style sheets define how to display HTML elements
Using CSS helps to build and edit pages much more efficiently.
http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp

If you really want to dig into the details of this stuff from the horse's mouth, go to: http://www.w3.org/

You will be amazed at what you can do if you become proficient with the above.
But this is just the basic requirements of creating/editing a web page.
There is so much more to running a website.

 

[ftaylor]

You can get all of the above at http://www.htmldog.com by Patrick Griffiths, an author at alistapart.com.

 

[nparkin0]

Wow, I am impressed with the help guys. Much appriciated. I am in the process of teaching myself html which is going ok. Hopefully will have a fully functioning website soon.

 

[onlinetv]

Drupal is solid, but has little support for nice looking templates.

Drupal is far better than joomla in so many ways. Like less hacks. Joomla template engines were hacked only a couple months ago! Complete control of root level!

The template system is easy in drupal (and you can choose from several template engines). All you need are creative designers. You dont even have to use colums if you are a good designer and place the block codes into an integrated design. We have created some doctor sites (they have money to spend) that you would never know was drupal.

Drupal is easy, you do not need to know programming to set it up or run it without modifications.

I only have two joomla installations left to convert to drupal. Joomla has a couple nice modules and the granular control of pages is exemplary but not worth the problems and security risks.

 

[Theo]

I referred to "templates". With a lot of sites that depend on a CMS, part of the solution is an out of the box template that spans every aspect of the user experience and admin interface. Otherwise, when you're talking about full development the cost of added design to the project might be prohibitive. For that matter, Joomla has the best looking templates.

 

[ftaylor]

I think that there are certainly a wider range of out of the box Joomla templates, but more people are moving to Drupal. Just won webware100 again by the way.