Attempting to develop a professional website

M

mritten

New Member
I am trying to put together a website for our medical office and have come across a million different possibilities to design a site myself as well as allowing professionals to do it. I would prefer to learn and attempt it myself however I am trying to find a way to design a website to closely mimic a medical website developing company that is established. I do like some of the sites in their portfolio and was curious what way I could go about designing a site like some of the ones they have developed. The companies website is http://www.physiciandesigns.com/ and I was curious if there is a program or way to design a site much like this site they developed http://www.thousandoaksgosa.com/.

I have used Serif WebPlus X6 which allows you to pretty much do anything with the right images, content and layout that you basically need to build from scratch. The company appears to use the same layout with just different color schemes, logo's and flash images they use on all of their different sites created within their portfolio page.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. I am not really interested in trying to learning to code, I have noticed others use wordpress or joomla which I have found confusing to setup and really develop a site when it's much easy to place objects and content exactly where you would like it to be when putting the site together. Thanks!
 
CaldwellYSR

CaldwellYSR

Member
mritten said:
I am not really interested in trying to learning to code
Click to expand...


Then you need to hire someone to design the site for you. There is absolutely no software available anywhere that will allow you to design a professional site without writing code yourself.
 
benjamin.morgan

benjamin.morgan

New Member
That is a very basic site, but if you have never touched code before you probably don't want to design the site yourself. At least not as your first site. If you have plenty of time to learn then you could build some practice sites then once you have learned enough build a static site for your company.
 
Phreaddee

Phreaddee

Super Moderator
Staff member
Paint by numbers website builders or
drag and drop website builders
WYSIWYG website builders or
magic button website builders or
whatever you may want to use

all promise the world, hell some even look half decent.
they all fail.
 
Edge

Edge

Member
Sorry to be harsh but what exactly is it about web design that makes novices think they can just pick it up and bang out a professional website? It's not possible - if you want a professional looking site learn the trade for a few years or get a professional. It's that simple.
 
Phreaddee

Phreaddee

Super Moderator
Staff member
an example of the "clean" code easywebcontent provides you

HTML: 
<div class='editable' style='position:relative'><div id='content_140' class='content_block def def_text'><p style="text-align: right; ">
	<span style="font-size:10px;"><span style="color:#663300;"><span style="font-family:lucida sans unicode,lucida grande,sans-serif;">Copyright 2011 Shannon Cakes. All Rights Reserved</span></span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: right; ">
	<span style="font-size:10px;"><a href="http://www.easywebcontent.com"><span style="color:#800000;"><span style="font-family:lucida sans unicode,lucida grande,sans-serif;">Powered by EasyWeb Content</span></span></a></span></p>
</div></div>
 
CaldwellYSR

CaldwellYSR

Member
Phreaddee said:
an example of the "clean" code easywebcontent provides you

HTML: 
<div class='editable' style='position:relative'><div id='content_140' class='content_block def def_text'><p style="text-align: right; ">
	<span style="font-size:10px;"><span style="color:#663300;"><span style="font-family:lucida sans unicode,lucida grande,sans-serif;">Copyright 2011 Shannon Cakes. All Rights Reserved</span></span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: right; ">
	<span style="font-size:10px;"><a href="http://www.easywebcontent.com"><span style="color:#800000;"><span style="font-family:lucida sans unicode,lucida grande,sans-serif;">Powered by EasyWeb Content</span></span></a></span></p>
</div></div>
Click to expand...

hahahahahaha
 
ronaldroe

ronaldroe

Super Moderator
Staff member
Phreaddee said:
an example of the "clean" code easywebcontent provides you

HTML: 
<div class='editable' style='position:relative'><div id='content_140' class='content_block def def_text'><p style="text-align: right; ">
	<span style="font-size:10px;"><span style="color:#663300;"><span style="font-family:lucida sans unicode,lucida grande,sans-serif;">Copyright 2011 Shannon Cakes. All Rights Reserved</span></span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: right; ">
	<span style="font-size:10px;"><a href="http://www.easywebcontent.com"><span style="color:#800000;"><span style="font-family:lucida sans unicode,lucida grande,sans-serif;">Powered by EasyWeb Content</span></span></a></span></p>
</div></div>
Click to expand...

I think I just threw up inside my mouth... :(
 
ronaldroe

ronaldroe

Super Moderator
Staff member
What everyone here is trying to tell you is that there is more to building out professional sites than just the way it looks. Any idiot can make a site that looks good. That's why there's a market for WYSIWYG. But a site that works good, that responds to the size it's viewed at, that provides high level (or even low level) interactivity, that loads quickly and looks good? That's an art. An art that takes time to learn and the right tools (read: text-based editors) to do.

And that just scratches the surface. What if you build it out, and your target audience is grandma, but she can't figure out how to get around? That's a whole new set of considerations.
 
CaldwellYSR

CaldwellYSR

Member
ronaldroe said:
What everyone here is trying to tell you is that there is more to building out professional sites than just the way it looks. Any idiot can make a site that looks good. That's why there's a market for WYSIWYG. But a site that works good, that responds to the size it's viewed at, that provides high level (or even low level) interactivity, that loads quickly and looks good? That's an art. An art that takes time to learn and the right tools (read: text-based editors) to do.

And that just scratches the surface. What if you build it out, and your target audience is grandma, but she can't figure out how to get around? That's a whole new set of considerations.
Click to expand...

Listen to what Ronald says. He's the most level headed here ;)
 
S

stlouisweb

New Member
In my opinion, if you have a good idea of what you want the site to look like than you should create a mock-up using Adobe Photoshop. Once you have perfected the mock-up that illustrates the look of the site consider all of the required functionality and put this in a document.

Now, once you have all this information you are ready to talk to a professional developer, evaluate your options here, and remember, you always get what you pay for.
 
CaldwellYSR

CaldwellYSR

Member
sdesign1 said:
and as they've used spans and inline styles their sites still pass the W3C validator - shows you valid code isn't everything...
Click to expand...

Yes but if they do this throughout the whole page then their html is going to be bloated so far beyond useable code that you can't debug errors and the file size is going to be unnecessarily large. Say all you want about it being valid, it's not a good way to do things.
 
T

TheWebTaylor

New Member
Although I would suggest hiring someone to develop the site for you, if you are not willing to do this I would highly recommend using Wordpress to build the site. Although it was originally used for blogging, it has expanded into being an easy to use, powerful CMS. The templating makes it easy for non-technical people to create half decent websites.
 
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