Newbie needs advise on setting up site

[gkrishna]

Hi,

I am a newbie and want some advise on setting up a site. I have got may domain gkrishna.com and hosted here at hostgator. It is basically a personal website.

Right now I have put some very basic pages using sitebuilder. I now realise that sitebuilder may not have been the best of decisions.

I realised that I should have used some of these CMS things.

I am willing to scrap this sitebuilder thing and start from scratch.

So looking for advise.

Things that I want to be able to do.

blogs - one each for me, wife and 2 kids
Album(s)
family tree with photos etc.
Wiki / Bulletin board kind of things for my friends and relatives.

My level of knowledge
Power user of office kind of products.
Beginning programmer can write some simple VBA scripts and Access things.
Linux knowledge - zero
Web hosting knowledge - zero

Any advise on how I should go about this is much appreciated

gkrishna

[alex]

hi

bit of a big question

how about trying this url or
movabletype is good for blogs, gallery is good for pics, also allows multiple users, and phpbb is a good forum.
all 3 of the above are easy to set up and are nice and user friendly.
perhaps it would be an idea to do some basic html pages and link up the scripts, that way you get to learn about the delights of html and webhosting at the same time

I hope the above is of some help

[gkrishna]

Hi,

Thanks for the advise.

I have been searching and found these two sites which seemed interesting.

Wondering if any feedback on either of these

This one seem to do everything except my family tree thing, including blogs, images, wikis etc. http://tikiwiki.org/ and this does http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpgedview/ family trees

[alex]

tikiwiki...hmm.....their site was down so I can't say

phpgedview looks a nice script, you don't have to use mysql and it has lots of info to read......I found some of the info on Gedcom to be a bit confusing..but the installation instructions seem to be pretty straight forward.

How are you with ftp, file permissions etc?

[gkrishna]

ftp is fine.

File permissions. I understand the idea of chmod. Not really used it

gk

[alex]

have you tried the scripts yet?
I quite like your "throw yourself in the water and you will learn how to swim philosophy" from your page 8)

[gkrishna]

I have downloaded tikiwiki and there is a nice install on shared hosting environment with only ftp instruction.

Am slogging my way through that.

I have taken my first few strokes through the water. I have a page up which uses HTML and CSS

[Rosie]

If you want instant results, use FrontPage or some other content generator (I've never used one, so I don't know which are available), and you can have your Control Panel install phpBB here for you. There are a LOT of free source code sites out there, from which you can find blogging tools, galleries, etc. The Google Directory is a great place to start

Although, if you want a little more control over your site (and throw in a little originality, functionality, friendliness, and satisfaction), you could learn HTML yourself, which really isn't too hard (congrats on your HTML page!), and then CSS. Or both at the same time, if you like. W3Schools has all of your HTML/CSS code reference needs (it only references valid code, though, so that you don't use something that will only show up on a handful of browsers). It does take a bit more time, however, then getting programs to do it all for you. I always prefer to do it myself when it comes to HTML and CSS, though, so I'm a little partial. Hehe, I guess I'm just old-fashioned Also, if you want your own graphics on your site, having something like Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop never hurts

Good luck with your website!

edit: *grumbles about HTML not working in the forum when it said it was on*