From the course: Getting Started as a Full-Stack Web Developer

Ways to create a website

From the course: Getting Started as a Full-Stack Web Developer

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Ways to create a website

“

- [Instructor] This course assumes that you're interested in becoming a web developer. You're not taking it just to build your first website. Because the truth is, you don't have to be a web developer to do that. It's much easier to just use an online website builder. Three of the most prominent are Wix.com, Weebly.com, and Squarespace.com. These are set up to let beginners build sites for specific purposes, such as an online store, a portfolio, or a blog. On its Templates page, Squarespace suggests designs to fit that purpose. And let's take a look at one of them. We'll just go down to the first one here. And here we can preview it, and then actually view a demo site so we can see how it works. Some web hosts have their own site builders, which you can get to through the web host's control panel. Here's one example. I go to Extra Features, and then to Site Builder. This takes a little while to load, but then I see an interface that's very similar to Squarespace's. If your web host has its own site builder, it might look like this or it might have a completely different interface. Such site builders can create pretty fancy websites with payment processing and other advanced features. Many have a limited free tier that includes hosting, and most let you export your content. But one of the downsides is that you have to do things their way, and you can't export the programming code or monkey with the gears like you can on a site that you personally develop. One online site builder deserves special mention, WordPress.com. It's different from the others in that it's built on an open source content management system, or CMS. Here, we're looking at the site builder in WordPress.com. But if we switch to WordPress.org, we can actually download the WordPress software itself, which is also free and infinitely customizable. But, if you download the software, you as a web developer have to upload and manage it on your own server. My own website at tomgeller.com is on the WordPress software, which is hosted on a server that I manage. Before WordPress, I used another CMS called Drupal, and I personally like to develop on top of CMSs like Drupal and WordPress because I get most of what I want without having to write custom code. But then, they're open enough to let me change them the way that I want. We can see that by going to my Administrators dashboard, then to Appearance, and then to Theme Editor. And there's some of the custom code that changes how my site looks and acts. Beyond website builders like Squarespace and CMSs like WordPress, there are graphical web-building tools that output HTML code. Adobe Dreamweaver is an expensive one that's quite popular, but free tools are also available. This one is called SeaMonkey. It's available for free at SeaMonkey-project.org. And we can see how it works. If I scroll down, I'll just find some text to change. I'll go with changing this from Essential Info to Important Info. And then of course, I would upload that to my own server. Finally, we come to text editors. They're the preferred tool of professional web developers because they work equally well for writing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or any other web development language. Some have features specifically for web development. I'll talk more about them in the upcoming video, Edit Pages with a Code Editor, and you'll see me use a code editor throughout this course. Needless to say, LinkedIn Learning has a lot of courses about these topics, from Squarespace, to WordPress, to Code Editors. And once you finish this course, you'll be well-prepared to explore them.

Contents