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ok i'm going to start a web site for us guys that like werewolves.
it going to have art work, written works, links to cool sites, werewolf info
mabey some cool downloads and other cool crap. no name yet

but i need your help i need software to make the site (windows xp)
sudgestions would be appericiated. tech adivice and name some free web hosts and other stuff that would be useful.

Well... If all you want to do is make a simple and limited website, go find yourself a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. I can't stand the things, so I'm not going to be able to point you at a good one.

If, on the other hand, you actually want to learn something, go learn HTML and do it by hand. It's easy and there are tons and tons of good resources out there. This is my suggestion. I do all my website code by hand in HTML, CSS and PHP.

Since you're just beginning, don't expect to be able to do anything complicated just yet. But don't be afraid to try -- that's how you learn.

Now, as for hosting, there are a lot of free hosts out there. Most of them really, really suck. Tough -- you get what you pay for.

You can find everything you'll ever need here.



If you're really lazy, just go get yourself a LiveJournal. You'll be able to do most of what you mentioned, and I'm sure you'll feel right at home in the LiveJournal community.

-- Vilkacis

If you need a place to put a web site, there's a number of free hosts, though they're pretty much all ad-driven, meaning that visitors will get inundated with pop-ups.

Geocities (http://www.geocities.com) is a fairly good one; it's ads are relatively unobtrusive. It's run by Yahoo! So, if you already have a Yahoo! Instant Messenger or email account ID, you can carry it over. You get fifteen MB worth of free hosting.

I'll concur about learning html; it's better in the long run to write your own site.

However, there's a lot of web-site design programs out there. If you have MS Word on your computer, it has wizards that will help create whole sites for you; it's then only a matter of uploading each file--pages and images. (Note that, because Word is Microsoft, the pages it creates will be two to three times the size they need to be, and will be filled with a lot of extraneous gobblety-gook, that could use up your 15 Meg limit early. Still, it's how I did some of my pages, and it lets you do fancy things like tables and frames until you've learned the codes for them.)

One thing you might want to do is "view source" on some existing sites. Don't copy them--that's stealing. But, you can learn html formatting over time by looking at them. But, before you do, read a basic tutorial on html first, otherwise it could look pretty overwhelming.

The first thing that Google will turn up on html tutorials is this site. It looks like a good start:

http://www.w3schools.com/html/

He could also try Dreamweaver...it's th program my mate uses for the website, and makes things a bit simpler...you drag and drop the items and it converts things to HTML for you.

As to hosting...I can recommend someone good, cheap, and furry/werewolf friendly...Gushi systems webhosting. 6$ a month for a lot of space, and a nice guy when you have questions or problems.

I'm not sure how she can do it but she says when I'm 18, she will get me a web space. I mean like a www.kiley.com or something!

Freewebs is a good site, it'll make making a site easy as ppie, with a mode for those who wanna make it with their own HTML, or a pre-made format for those who know no HTML, or very little.