Newbie with a few questions!

Hi guys

good to finally find a site like this as I'm totally new to web development and could do with some help!

A group of friends and myself are trying to set up a website that is going to contain a mixture of discussion forums, news, features and articles (so quite dynamic in terms of content), which we decided to get a small company we know to do because we didn't feel we had the knowledge to do a sufficiently professional job of ourselves. I'm the only one works in IT, but that's with VB6 and SQL server so am pretty web illiterate.

Unfortunately what we've had back from them to date - a graphic of how the site would look - doesn't look good at all and has taken them a very long time to do. When the site was up and running it was always our intention that I would take over the maintenance of it, but becaue it's taken so long to get going I'm now contemplating doing some of the development myself and am doing all I can now to learn the subject! At the very least I want to understand and be confident the tools they're using are going to be right for us and easy to support.

With that background just got a couple of quick questions which if need moved let me know and I'll post them in the right place :

1. If we wanted to design the "look and feel" of the site (ie the colour scheme, fonts, placement of navigation bar) that would then get applied to all the pages on the site, what software are options are there to do it ourselves that would be easy for the novice to use? And is what i'm talking about developing called a stylesheet? The thinking here was if we went away and did the design side we could just tell the company we're using to concentrate on the techy stuff. I found some place called www.ipage.com that looks like it would be easy for beginners to develop templates with, but I couldn't work out why they needed you to transfer your domain to them to use it. If anyone knows anything about it that would be a big help

2. I've been reading up a bit today on php and think I'm beginning to understand it - it looks like it could definitely be of use to us as a lot of the bulletin boards (which our site would definitely need) are written in php. I gather the alternative to using php is asp - is there anywhere you could recommend I read up on the differences between them and the appropriateness of where each one is used?

3. On a dynamic site with lots of articles, what in your experience is the best way to manage the content? Buying a content management system for us would be out because we're on a shoestring budget, but if there's good and easy to use ones out there for free I'd be interested to know. As for actual changes to say the position of stuff on pages or adding a new poll to a page or something, I guess I'm going to have some visual software to do this with in the future. The guys we're using claim they're gong to code the hmtl by hand but this worries me because how would we then make changes ourselves? If there's any good tips for easy maintenance of sites I'd be grateful to know

Anyway better wrap this up for now but looking forward to learning from you all on the boards as our site gets underway, and hopefully I can help with any SQL problems people have too ;-)

cheers mark

Hi Mark and welcome to Webforumz!

Ok, there's quite a bit there, so i'll try to get through it!

1. Colour scheme, fonts, etc can all be controlled by a stylesheet and that will cover your entire website. Design is, in my opinion, a very different topic. It's best handled with a program like Dreamweaver, with graphics made in a seperate program, such as Photoshop. However placement of items on the page, such as your navigation will need to be done seperately. This could be accomplished by simply using an include line in any number of languages from ASP to PHP.

...talking of which...

2. PHP and ASP can be used to do pretty much exactly the same things, however the languages are quite different. ASP is developed by Microsoft and as such, only runs on windows (it can run on Unix, but it's a fairly poor emulation for more advanced programming). ASP is usually scripted in VB - So I expect you would feel very much at home using it. You can install IIS on windows 2000, XP, etc, very easily and run ASP scripts locally.
PHP is a different beast. It's open-source, like Linux and mainly runs on Linux. It uses the C and C++ style of language, so if you'd prefer that you might want to give it a go. You can get PHP to run on windows, but it's nowhere near as fast and refined. PHP has a lot of packages available for it and has many SQL functions built in.
Each has it's own strengths and weaknesses and both will scale pretty well until you get to huge systems and then both become redundant. It really comes down to your preference or the situation.
One thing here though... to get ASP to work with a database on a large and frequently used site, you will not want to use access as your database - You'll want to use MSSQL. This can be quite expensive. PHP uses MySQL regardless and is far more robust to make this transition (and is much cheaper than MSSQL). However, ASP, using an Access database is normall cheaper than PHP with a MySQL database!

3. The best way to manage lots of content is usually a database with a content management frontend! There are free ones available out there for both ASP and PHP...

A good site to look is : http://www.hotscripts.com/

To expand on Sirkent's third point. What you're talking about your site doing is pretty much exactly what any of the web portal scripts out there does. Check out http://maxwebportal.com/ for an ASP one, or http://www.warez.fr/nuked.html for a PHP one. There's others out there too. They're free, skinnable and shouldn't be hard to customize too.

HTML can be edited using any text editor, like notepad for example.

If I was you I would purchase some linux/php/mysql hosting, use phpnuke and just use one of the many skins available. That way there would be no design or development work required on your part, just time needed to setup and customise.

thanks very much for the responses guys, there's some very helpful stuff in there. Think we're defintely leaning towards php and mySQL and just getting someone to design a stylesheet for us. What are phpNuke and skins about out of interest Smokie?

you can read about and download phpnuke from here:

http://www.warez.fr/nuked.html

once you have it up and running you can download skins (stylesheets and images) created by others especially for phpnuke. Some of them are really nice and your sure to find something you'll like. No need to get someone to design a stylesheet for you when you can get it all for free. I think the only thing you'll need is a logo.