Which program for my site? My first one!

Katzaii

New Member
Hello everybody, I am completely new to this world of webdesign. I am a French teacher and I would like to create a quite simple site but where my futur students will be able to fill a test that will be send to me. I would appreciate also a google map to show my house. I want a simple design with quite many pictures. But the site alltogether wont be bigger than 6/7 pages. I look around in internet and heard about dreamweaver and CMS. Would it be right to design my site in dreamweaver and to use CMS to manage it then? Isn¨t it difficult to link both? And can't I use CMS to design it? I read about templates and Joomla?
Many questions, I know! I know nothing. But I am eager to learn.

Thanks for helping
Karine

PS: does anybody want to learn french in Brittany, directly near the beach ?:)(ok, cold water, but still a beach!)
 

horrorshow75

New Member
Well this is kind of a hard question to answer for someone new to the world of web design. It's important to understand the diffrences between the two things you asked about. Dreamweaver is considered a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) program. You would basically use this tool to build a website from the ground up, either by using the code tab to manually write your code or the design tab "draw" the layout of your site and let the app create the code for you.

A CMS (Content Management System) is basically a site that is already built. Very little to no coding involved on your part. Basically all you have to do is skin it (using the themes you mentioned) to look how you want. A CMS is great time saver since you don't have to spend alot of time building the stucture of your site. There are also plenty to choose from, Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress (not just for blogs anymore), etc. Another great thing about a CMS is you can accomplish alot of programming tasks with the use of plugins. These allow you to "add-on" things to your site that would otherwise take you hours of programming via php or js. If you plan to use a CMS the best way to implement would be to signup with a hosting company that offers "Fantastico". Fantastico allows you to install web apps to your domain by filling a few fields. I use Hostgator and I have also used Dreamhost. Both are very good in my opinion. I'm sure others will offer their choice of hosting companies. Just pick that you feel best suits your needs.

Hope that all made sense and helps you out.
 
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