The Best and Cheapest Ways to Design and Code Your Site

Author: Tiara Rea

As a novice webmaster myself, I know how trying it can be to start a website when you don’t know where to begin. I’m the kind of person who likes to have the design and coding layed out before I do any content, and I get frustrated when I can’t have things the way I need them: i.e. I must have my layout ready to go before I start any kind of writing. Otherwise, I end up not making much sense at all.

So if you’re anything like me, you’ve been looking for places to get free web design layouts and templates to start your website. Or maybe you just need a good starting-point or some inspiration. Either way, all the sites I’ve found for this month’s article are Newbie-Friendly, which is a plus for up-and-coming webmasters, but they’re also technically rich and make for incredible designing, which is great for those of you who’ve been in the business before but just want an extra edge or need to learn advanced HTML, CSS, or the like.

Killersites.com: Welcome to Geek Heaven. Though KillerSites.com was founded in order to support the best-selling book Creating Killer Web Sites, it’s evolved into a friendly, community-oriented haven for anyone who wants to learn (or teach!) web design. They have active and really amazing discussion forums, web design articles, tutorials, and a couple nice sister sites I checked out recently that go even further in depth. One such site is How-To-Build-Websites.com, a place I can’t believe I’ve never found before. Designed for newbies who use Dreamwaver, FrontPage, or other WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) programs, it’s also just a great place to learn HTML, CSS, Advanced HTML, and a little bit of programming too. Or check out KillerPHP.com, which has an incredible collection of videos on everything from “What is PHP?” to “Processing HTML Forms with PHP”. The best part about all the KillerSites.com friends is that they all assume you need to have things explained, demonstrated, and shown, all in “non-nerd terms”. It’s pretty amazing.

CoffeeCup’s HTML Editor: If you’re like me, the first thing you did when you learned about Lunarpages’ offer of $700 worth of CoffeeCup Software was you ran to download the bundle…and then sat staring at your computer in awe. And, if you’re even more eerily similar to me, you tried everything out all at once and played around with all the cool settings. One of the last things I actually toyed with was the HTML Editor, but I found it to be one of the best pieces of software in the bundle. If you know HTML, CSS, etc., there’s a place to go in, alter or create a design, and then another place to see how it’ll look in your browser before you even upload it! And if you’re like me and just want to play around and see how some of the templates or layouts look, you can do that too, because you are not only able to view your page before you upload it, but you can also drag and drop your text, images, links, and anything else you can think of to put on your site. Just type, edit, drag, drop, and in no time, you’ve got a professional website in half the time it’d take you to learn to code it. Speaking of, click on the tab at the top and you can see the code, even if you’re just dragging and dropping! Pretty spiffy, huh? And oh yeah, it’s completely free to Lunarpages’ customers! We’re so crazy we’re giving it away!!

W3Schools.com: Another one of my personal favorites, at W3schools you are sure to find everything you ever wanted to know about web-building, HTML, XHTML, Javascript, CSS, and just about anything else you can think of. The thing I like best about this site (besides the fact that it’s free of course!) is that it’s easy to understand and has “Try-It-Yourself Online Examples” that actually let you copy, paste, and edit code right on the website! I was entertained by this for far too long, and probably should’ve been working… but I learned a ton. This site also has a comprehensive list of tutorials which are almost overwhelmingly impressive, plus a variety of “Quick Starters”, such as “My First HTML” and “My First JavaScript”, all written in a language we can all understand without feeling like complete newbies. HTML, XML, DHTML, SQL, Flash – if it has anything to do with web-building, you’ll find it at W3 Schools, and you’ll always find it for free.

OSWD.org: The “Open Source Web Design” project was born in 2000 and provides users with over 2,000 website layouts in various and lovely forms… absolutely free (yes, this is our main theme this month)! I stumbled upon this site accidentally a couple months back, and it was the best mistake I ever made. Not only do they have some of the most exquisite designs that are yours at a cost of zero dollars and zero cents, but you can download them directly to your computer and BAM – right in front of you sits a nice little folder with everything you need to manage this design yourself and truly make it your own. This site’s not only useful for newbies who just want to have a hot layout for their site (because it’s incredibly simple to input) but it’s also a great source for experts who want a basic code to alter on their own or business folk who want the upper edge with a design that’s easy to navigate and impressive to view. There’s also the Designologue: A Link Blog, For Designers, where you can check out links to other great sites on design, web standards, “and whatever else they like” or add your own great link. Good open source projects are hard to come by, so check this one out soon. They have an extremely warm, welcoming community.

If any of you have any design or help sites you think should be featured in upcoming newsletters, please drop me a line at Affiliate@lunarpages.com and tell me a little bit about the site, how it’s helped you, and of course, your name.