Design Your Own Website With iWeb – Introduction

I have very limited knowledge of HTML, and have no experience with writing Javascript or any other web programming language. I am basically good for nothing if you ask me to design a site for you. I have no real training on the subject unless you consider reading books borrowed from the library “expert training”. I am self trained, self taught, and self critical when it comes to throwing together my own websites.

I have two websites out there that I made from scratch. That’s right, I got down in the dirt and made them look the way they do. I think they look good, but you are the ultimate judge on that. How did I do this if I don’t have any web programming experience or a real grasp on the full power of XHTML? iWeb, of course!

The first of the two is www.whereyouarenow.com. I put this website together to act as a holding spot for what became the WYAN Financial Network (very unofficial title but accurate). We first started blogging about personal finances. Then we started a podcast and radio show. And then I started posting videos on the subject. We had email and facebook and just lots of loose ends that had no “hub”. So I took that word “hub” and made one to hold everything.

As you can see in the image above, this is a very simple website. There are no forms to fill out, no games to play, and nothing difficult about it; especially since I used iWeb to build it. The most difficult part, if you have zero experience with HTML, is inserting the images so that they act as links to external websites, which is a simple line of HTML that you could copy from anywhere and customize for your needs. So, to build this, I put some text in on a black background, uploaded images to my FTP, linked those images to external websites (our blog, about page, podcast website, etc…), and clicked save. Next I uploaded the site folders on my hard drive to my FTP and that’s it.

Another site I threw together in iWeb was www.aaronaiken.com (good personal branding ). This too is a simple website with not much going on except some text and a few pictures. There are two pages, a “less” page and a “more” page.

Less

More

So again, very simple websites can be thrown together without much thought in iWeb.  They will still look good and serve their respective purposes.

I realize that this is a very basic introduction and does not provide much guidence for how to make a website like this using the application, but that is the point. I just wanted to show you what can be done, get your gears spinning. A more detailed tutorial on how to build a website like the ones above is on the way. Until then, start thinking about what you want to do. I recommend drawing your design ideas on paper, and writing out what text you want to appear on your pages. Also come up with some sort of “mission statement” or reason for the website, doing so will help give you some sort of direction for the design and content.