web authoring software

i'm not sure about web authoring packages lately as i only use Dreamweaver MX which is simultaneously a bit hard for novices and a bit rubbish for pros but i'm sure others can suggest good free or cheap software here.

so are we allowed to know what the site is for/about?

I use BT, which is somehow involved with Yahoo too, and I can't see where they offer webspace, but it does seem likely. I want to use a lot of high-res images, so space might become an issue really quickly.

Um, I kind of don't want to talk up the project here, because I can imagine either taking ages to get it going or starting it up and then not keeping the development going. It's not some brilliant idea anyone will pinch or anything, and no money involved. (Ask me when you see me next, Steve.)

Their Fireworks tool is good for the image manipulation/rollovers/javascript stuff.

Macromedia make a whole suite of all thesr tools (DW, Flash, Fireworks et al) that are fantastic for this sort of thing (I can hear proper html/CSS coders out there frothing in rage at me, but nehhh). Its expensive, but I'd say very well worth it to streamline large projects, especially if yr coding/html is rusty like mine.

Really, just get a book on CSS / HTML. Forget abotu dHTML or JavaScript. not worth your time.

If you can understand eclipse or Jbuilder you can figure Dreamweaver.

Design in Photoshop - Export from Imageready

those dotted-underline links which just give you a little text box

Probably some CSS + Javascript? Find a site that does it, view source and copy their code.

lots of images, preferably clickable image maps too

Photoshop --> Imageready

no need for DW tho.

Oh, you will probably want to make sure that the webspace you're using either has php/mySQL installed or that you can install them--that will let you do lots of fun little tricks and such.

you can always see what you're making in the browser window tho?. i don't think i understand, but it's not an issue - i was just suggesting what i thought you might like. whatever you are happy with. really!

title of website

put text and/or images in bere
put text and/or images in bere
put text and/or images in bere
put text and/or images in bere
put text and/or images in bere

otherwise, dreamweaver isn't bad. I use it all the time for one-off pages. you should still know html though or it can fill in a lot of weird and useless code. exporting from imageready: URGH. I hate this. I work on contract jobs with a designer an in the itnerest of getting stuff done fast and allowing her to bill as much time as I bill we do a lot of pages like this and then I just clean up the code and do whatever php work needs to be done. But imageready does the stupidest shit.

* this may sound idiotic, but I don't use WTS at work more than a few times a year nowadays, so my password is noted down there with the other 95 (not an exaggeration - I think it's actually 97) I have cause to use.

Now I need to start planning the first pages, and some overall structural and design and writing principles. (I don't suppose there is any risk of this, but no one should be holding their breath in excited anticipation, as this will be, even if it's as good as I hope, of only mild interest to a handful of ILXers. And I'll have to do a fair bit before it's even worth offering a URL.)

Ha, I just tried my first choice of domain names, and while the com/net/org varieties are gone, I could go for .co.uk or .info, among others. I didn't know that latter existed. Is it designed for informational sites? Because that could be a decent category for what I am planning. Hm, and if I put a hyphen between the two words, only com has gone. Is there some principle of what extensions belong to what kinds of site?

Um, that's nice but those are both things Martin specifically mentioned in the original post. Use whatever you want I was simply throwing another option out there.

I only have to alter the one CSS file now to change all my pages look and feel. THANX iLX ONCE AGAIN!

Regarding little popup definitions, you should decide whether you want something that pops up when you simply mouseover the text, or something that pops up when you click. Think about how often you'll use this feature, how optional its use should be, and how much work you'll be asking the reader to do. Perhaps you want to hack the ABBR or ACRONYM tag (although this has problems in IE, and is really not the proper thing to do), or do a simple popup like this fellow does with his asterisks, but probably the most elegant solution is (yep!) create a new CSS class.

Check out the source code of the first paragraph in this page and see how the author uses the ABBR tag and a class called "help" to do what seem like the same thing. You can poke around his css and see how he did it.

Also, the O'reilly DHTML Cookbook is awesome. I have it on my desk & I check things in it all the time.

And if you want a nice graphics program that's not too expensive, buy Adobe Photoshop CS- should be about $100, but you're getting 90% of the USEFUL bits of the full version of Photoshop. I've used regular Photoshop a lot, but I have CS on my ibook these days because it works just as well for rendering web graphics. If I was going to go back to putting on shows of composited images and whatever, I'd probably go back to full Photoshop. The CS version is more than adequate for making buttons, cleaning up images, making logos, and so forth.

There's not much you can do in HTML to get around the image layout problem, other than using dreaded tables or just manually positioning your 'img' tags within the text body.

There is a site that produces fancy looking logo's for you, for free. I'll see if I can find it again but never used it myself so don't know how good the results are

table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"

That was the first place I looked, but it didn't look a likely explanation.

aaarghhhh YOU BEAT ME TO IT!!

Not sure how much space I will need. My first ten pages barely top 100kB, but I have biggish plans, so will definitely want 50MB in the medium term, and it might grow beyond that. Other than no fucking with my pages, what criteria are there beyond price? Any recommendations? How do I begin to guess at my bandwidth needs, which I assume are part of the deal? I'm not expecting my site to ever be busy.

There are a million hosts out there, so I can only recommend the ones I've used.

http://siteground.com/
http://qwk.net

Something to remember about pop-up tooltips is that the ALT attribute in images automatically appears as a tooltip when you mouse over an image with Internet Explorer. If you create a custom tooltip with CSS and/or javascript you may get both the tip you created, PLUS the ALT text tooltip - so leave out the ALT text if you make your own tooltip.

CSS fixes it for everything in one shot: body { margin: 0; }

(xpost)

(oh, try the scripts in gimp: xtns in main main - script-fu - buttons / logos, defaults can be quite nasty but plenty of options to play with)

there appears to be a limit to how much of a title attribute text appears when you mouseover (this works with links as well as pictures btw, maybe even divs and spans (yep)) so it may not be suitable for handling the little popup definitions (um, firefox shows ~70 characters, IE all of them in one long line, both browsers undisplay them after a couple of seconds). a little javascript popup thing is only about 10 lines of code. (http://www.webafrica.co.za/kb/developers/tooltips_floating_captions.html is quite clever - it overrides the TITLE attribute using css so you don't have to change anything)

ie is just ignoring the width=95% (and i must say i've never seen anyone use that before). generally resizing an image using a different width and height to its native size is a bad idea (browser has to download the entire thing (bandwidth problems) and then generally uses a bad (but fast) algorithm for the resize so it looks poor). much better to resize the picture yourself and use a fixed size.

also http://www.positioniseverything.net/ is good for fighting with IE madness

ftp is available from dos command line (if such a thing exists in anything newer than w2k). but yes, filezilla much better

i'd be tempted to give the picture a row of its own within the main table so all the text will always be underneath.

(btw you have two close TDs after the image title.)