Website - Where to start?

[f1oored]

I am part of a gaming club at work. We get together every few months and play games over a lan. My company was kind enough to provide us with some space on the intranet to make our own website. The problem is that no one really has the time to maintain the website.

I am willing to take the responsiblity of creating and maintaining this website but the only web design I know is very very basic html. I think I can teach myself just about anything with the aid of the internet tutorials and whatnot. I just need to know where to start. What program would you suggest for a beginner who wants to avoid any formal training? The website doesn't have to be really fancy but a few bells and whistles might be nice. I want to be able to at least put up a basic page in less than a month.

Any suggestions on software would be great.
If anyone knows of any good tutorials online, that would be nice also.

[Agent_Embryo]

99% of creating a website should be to have relevant content. What is the purpose of the website? You need to first decide what content to have. After that is done you should build a very basic page, with no graphics at all to start with, but with the basic structure you want. Then it's time to start working on layout, graphics etc. This is all IMO of course.

[Undeadlord]

Hey bud,

One thing I know thats easy to do is use templates!
http://www.steves-templates.com/

Is a cool site for templates, you can use some of them for free and they are a good way to get a snazzy look even if you only use basic html.

Undeadlord

[f1oored]

What about programs like dreamweaver and frontpage? Should I learn to use one of those?

The website is just going to give info about the group. Meetings, members, and pictures of past events.

[eagle1]

I think you should first work the layout on paper then learn how to do it in HTML.
You could try cool things like Flash and all that stuff but frankly I prefer simple designs (and since I'm still on dialup!! ).

[eagle1]

I usually just use Notepad but I've heard many good things of dreamweaver.!

[Undeadlord]

Dreamweaver and Frontpage are good tools, I prefer dreamweaver, but if your only using basic HTML then like eagle said Notepad would work just fine.

I use this
http://www.tucows.com/preview/194452.html

Its called AceHTML, freeware, basically its a very fancy notepad with some really nice features.

Undeadlord

[ArcticFox]

Yeah if I were you I'd get Dreamweaver MX, 2004 or not, and use that instead of Notepad.

[crouse]

I've helped create 2 gaming sites...

www.clanimo.com (now changed) and http://www.gamershdq.com/

using myphpnuke or postnuke makes setup fairly simple and maintence ALOT simpler.

HTH's