[Ed Shacklee]

Is there software or an online tutorial that Spherians would recommend for building and maintaining a website?

Based on recommendations that were posted in an earlier thread, I subscribed to a number of literary magazines. Some very good print magazines have a fairly primitive online presence. I wondered -- is this intentional, or due to lack of expertise? Being a techno-primitive myself, this led to the next question: how does one gain such expertise?

Ed

[Maryann Corbett]

Ed, there are books on website development. One starts, I think, with learning basic HTML. Not that I have; I extort help from my offspring. Rose Kelleher would be the person to ask about starting places. Tim Love too. And Kate Benedict.

You ask whether a primitive web site is a deliberate choice for some magazines. I think it is sometimes, because as a reader I like some of the simple sites better. The sites with the greatest number of techno bells and whistles are not the ones that make the poems easiest to read. My preference is for clean, simple readability and easy navigation as top priorities.

You didn't ask for all these opinions, but here they are anyway

I'd rather see black text, in a readable typeface, on a white ground, with tools to enlarge the text. Maybe a bit of red for accent. I want to be able to get easily from the poem to the contributor's page, and also able to page through the poems or through the contributors' notes.

I definitely want one poem per screen and not a blog format that I have to scroll down--just as I don't like a mixed-up, several-poem-per-page format in a print publication. Blog format is simpler for the editor to set up--there are a million blog formats out there--but bad for reading, IMO.

Artwork is great but secondary and not great if it distracts. Sound files in a magazine are not especially important to me. Video is completely unimportant to me. Fancy technologies like issuu used to bug me, but I may be getting acclimated to them.

Formats I like a lot: The Flea, Umbrella, Anti- and Per Contra. Oh, and Diagram. Others will probably come to mind....

[Adam Elgar]

My tech-savvy brother-in-law is trying to get me to build myself a site - an idea which scares me to death. He's given me an ancient Adobe starter pack called "GoLive" (version 6.0) which he says is idiot-proof and still viable. I have yet to open the tutorial book.

This situation could go on for some time.....

[W.F. Lantry]

Originally Posted by Ed Shacklee

Is there software or an online tutorial that Spherians would recommend for building and maintaining a website?

Ed,

What seems simple gets complicated very quickly as the site grows, and clean and simple is actually harder than cluttered and messy...

Very few people code by hand anymore. Most people use a software package, like Dreamweaver, to create the HTML for them. Many sites have databases that actually hold all their information, and people use dreamweaver to create the interface between the database and the browser.

You can see this happening on this very page. If you're in Firefox, move your mouse to the top left of your screen. Click VIEW, and then click PAGE SOURCE. That should give you a text file. You can see, if you scroll way down, the actual text you read, but you can also see all the auto-generated coding.

Anyway, a copy of dreamweaver, or its free equivalents, can take you a very long way very quickly. It's very much like cooking: for some people, frying an egg is difficult. For others, cooking is a fascinating creative art. And you never know which kind of person you are until you try...

Thanks,

Bill

[Ed Shacklee]

Thanks, Bill. I'm going to pick up a book on dreamweaver and go from there. It sounds interesting!

Ed

[Clive Watkins]

Dear Ed

Your question set me browsing. I came across this from last year. It seemed interesting. Our real web buffs will no doubt know more.

Best...

Clive

[W.F. Lantry]

Clive,

Well, yes and no. Something will eventually kill Dreamweaver, but I seriously doubt it will be Drupal. We see these articles all the time: Ruby will kill Coldfusion. Rails will kill Coldfusion. Ruby-on-Rails will kill Coldfusion.

I know it sounds like I'm making this up. Try this link: http://corfield.org/entry/On_Hal_Hel...on_and_Fusebox

Everyone's been shooting at it for years. And yet, people are still using Dreamweaver to write Coldfusion code to hit databases.

Theoretically, I would actually prefer it if the LAMP array dominated. I would much prefer open-source. But it's so wild west. One coder works on a project, then the next comes along and says "We have to change everything..."

Ed, you're going to find Dreamweaver is not cheap. You may wish to try Seamonkey, which is free and downloadable. Then, once you've gotten your feet wet, you can move on to Dreamweaver...

Thanks,

Bill

[John Whitworth]

There are two ways to go.

You can be Les Murray and get someone else to do it for you. Come on - everybody knows a friendly nerd.

You can be me and get yourself posted onto a site where somebody esle has done the spadework. In my case a wonderful woman and poet called Ann Stewart who does it all for a minuscule fee, so small that I can't remember what it is. Of course she picked me out of jostling thousands in the first place. Many people have got in touch with me through her website. Ann Drysdale's on it too - ain't you, Ann - and it does the biz.

People who say that some piece of software is so simple that even YOU could follow it obviously don't know YOU. I've just managed to suss out how to sent texts by mobile phone and I still don't know how you do all thatshorthand stuff.

Poets - don't meddle with websites. Unless you are Ann Stewart. Isn't there an American Ann Stewart?

[Maryann Corbett]

If the real question is "How does a poet get a website?" we should mention the services of Peter Bloxsom (I'm sure there's a link from The Flea or The Chimaera).

I've been playing with the possibilities at weebly.com though not without some frustrations.

[Ed Shacklee]

This is an interesting discussion about how a poet can set up his or her website. I suppose one should experiment upon oneself first, and I hope there’s more talk about it, but that wasn’t the thought that prompted me to start this thread.

I recently subscribed to a very fine print magazine, which shall go unnamed, and wished that their website was more advanced. It may be by choice, but it seemed they were missing a golden opportunity to show the world what they had. I realized they were probably like me, and lacked the necessary expertise to set up a better site. I entertained the whimsy of learning how to set up a better site and, assuming they wanted help, helping them out. Maybe it would be cheaper just to donate a bundle of cash, but you know the saying about the relative advantages of giving a man a fish or teaching him to fish.

So: to school. Come to think of it, I should probably check out the local papers for evening classes on building a website.

Ed