Carrie Webb: Another question here from of Lord of Sporks. Lord of Sporks says, “Robbie or Carrie, I was wondering if you could explain if or how one can get in to making a website. I've never done it before and I don’t know how to code if there is any easy options out there for us website newbies.” Do you have any information for Lord of Sporks?
Robbie Ferguson: Essentially because you’ve never done it before and you don’t know like HTML code and things like that I'm going to start you out with saying you should get into either a content management system like Joomla. That’s going to take care of all the front end stuff for you. That’s probably a really easy bet if you can get that set up or if you want to quote it yourself you can use a WYSIWYG what you see is what you get type editor. For Linux there's one called NVUnet2.com/nvu. That’s going to bring you there and this software probably available for this and after come out a 100% sure.
But this is like what you see is what you get editor for cross platform use. But essentially that will allow you to create a site but I would say if you can look at a package like Joomla and we've look it on previous episode at Category 5 Technology TV. If you’ve seen our website at Category5.TV it’s based on Joomla so it makes things easy because I don’t have to worry about so much for the front then. I do because I tweak things and stuff like that and I am a bit of a PHP dub but for you it gives you the chance to just use the template and then just enter things in such a way that it’s kind of like a web based version of a word processor so it just makes thing really easy.
For example, if I log in to Joomla on my system so this is our site. So once I log in as the administrator now I can go into my content items here and I create a new content item and for that content item you'll see that it will and we’re using a ton of then with here so things are a little slower than usual on the web. It’s going to give me a little basically like a word processor style editor so I can start typing away here. I can use things like bold, underline and simple things like that and you add images. You can do stuff like that.
But the advantage to using the content management system is that the actual designs of the size taste consistent throughout. You don’t have to think about the code that goes into that. You can download free templates like the actual designs for your site or you can go somewhere likes Rocket Theme and there are great place to be able to buy commercial themes as well.
If you want to take it further than that let me know but maybe pop a question to me through the website if you have any development experience whatsoever then that could help you. But maybe that will point you in the right direction I hope.
Carrie Webb: I have a confession. The reason I didn’t take any business courses other than typing in high school because I was scared they were going to make me create a website.
Robbie Ferguson: Oh yeah?
Carrie Webb: I thought that is way too hard but that looks okay. Maybe I’ll try one out.
Robbie Ferguson: It’s really great like since I've been using a content management system. It just makes things so much easier when it comes to maintenance. So if want to change something on my site I just basically open that content item. I don’t have to edit the code and stuff and I do but you wouldn’t have to, so you don’t need to learn the code to use something like Joomla.
Carrie Webb: Okay.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services