Resource: Learning Web Publishing

From the Gifted Homeschooler Yahoo Group, personal info removed:

Here are a few ideas for you.

(1) You can use iWeb on the Mac. The only thing is, your options are somewhat limited.
It's easy to get started, but pretty restricted in what you can do.

(2) Another really simple (and free) way to get started making a Web
site is to use something like "wikispaces" -- see

http://wikispaces.com

You can choose a username and password of your choice to set up an
account with wikispaces, and then you can create a new site. The
"free" site will have text advertising on the side of the page.

The instructions on how to create pages using Wikispaces are pretty
easy to follow. See

http://www.wikispaces.com/help+index

(3) There are quite a few places where you can set up a basic Web
site for free and use a template (a pre-setup Web page design) to do
it. This lets you get started fairly quickly.

Here's an example from Yahoo:

http://geocities.yahoo.com/

If you have a Yahoo ID you use with the [...] mailing list, the same
one would work with this.

(4) If you want to do "real," full, unlimited-possibilities Web
publishing, you would

(a) Buy "Web-editing" software -- the most popular, easy-to-use,
and full-featured is Dreamweaver (that's what I use). The
"educational" price (for students like yourself) at Academic
Superstore for Dreamweaver CS3 is $194.95 -- see

< http://www.academicsuperstore.com/market/marketdisp.html?PartNo=798273&qk_srch=dreamweaver>

(b) Create your Web site using this completely open-ended software
(you can do anything with it).

(c) Find a place to "host" your Web site... this is a company that
has Web servers (computers with software that "serve" your pages to
visitors with Web browser software) connected to the Internet. There
are free (ad-supported) sites widely available. If you want a site
without ads, for $10 per month you can get lots of space. A company I
like to use is Dreamhost,

http://www.dreamhost.com/

(d) Once you've set up an account with such a company, you can
transfer the files you created on your computer, to a space on their
computer server.

As to how you would go about *learning* how to do any of these
options, it depends on which one. The first options I mentioned are
pretty simple, and you can just "play around with them" and look
through their online Help files to figure out how to use them. This
is a great way to get started... and then if you really like it, and
want to do more, you can proceed to the latter option, using
Dreamweaver and a hosting company.

If you do want to use Dreamweaver to do full Web publishing, the
online Help files that come with it are excellent. The "QuickStart"
books are great for learning programs like Dreamweaver, too, such as

< http://www.amazon.com/Dreamweaver-Windows-Macintosh-Visual-QuickStart/dp/0321503023/>

The "Total Training" DVD for Dreamweaver is good too:

< http://www.academicsuperstore.com/market/marketdisp.html?PartNo=798073>

There are also some online courses I can recommend if you want to go
deeper than that and learn more, those from the HTML Writers Guild:

http://iwa-hwg.eclasses.org/