Is building a website still as tricky as it used to be?

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I haven't tried to write one since about 2000 and back then you could quite easily use a wizard to make an Angelfire site about your dog and it's fleas but it would be pretty basic and not that nice to look at.
In a very short amount of time the internet has gone from something only very sad people do instead of getting a life to the national pasttime of millions of office workers around the world. In short, unless you've been living under a rock for the last five years you will not only know what the internet is but also how to use a search engine, send an email, browse for websites and use your favourites to come back to them. Even a child can use a chatroom and Google has now replaced the school library for swatting-up on homework subjects.
People depend on the web for everything - booking holidays, staying in touch with friends, making new friends, downloading music and movies, playing games and buying everything from clothes to records to even food.
I am a heavy internet user. I'm online pretty much all day at work and when I get home I take advantage of my 4Mb line to download music and email people. Yet why does the idea of trying to start my own website daunt me so? After all I've been staring at a computer monitor ever since my dad taught me to type CH."ARCADIANS" into our BBC Micro so surely it must be a doddle to get my bit of interweb action, considering all things. If the internet is a forum for everyone that is not restricted by boundaries and laws then why can't I just shit out a simple, decent looking website within a day or two?
Of course it's not that simple. Back in 1999 I decided to for-go the Angelfire wizards and taught myself a very basic knowledge of HTML. I designed a static page for my band, resplendent with a horrible background pattern, the odd picture that took forever to load and a bunch of links that didn't work properly. And of course because it was a free website through Angelfire it wasn't without the massive long URL and irritating pop-ups you'd expect to get with such things.
Is it easier to build a website now? Is there a package (preferably cheap or free) to help me do this? What about webspace? What about domain names? Do I still need to know HTML? Or Flash? Or Java?
Is the web really a panoramic service for all who log on? Or are we bowing down to the geeks? It seems that any website worth it's salt will cost a lot of money and time to run, not to mention the knowledge and skill required to build and maintain it. A child may be able to go on a chatroom, but who is running it?

In short, have things changed and will they ever?

― dog latin (dog latin), Wednesday, 22 June 2005 18:01 (twenty years ago)

― dahlin (dahlin), Wednesday, 22 June 2005 18:05 (twenty years ago)

THIS THREAD HAS BEEN LOCKED BY AN ADMINISTRATOR

― Britain's Jauntiest Shepherd (Alan), Wednesday, 22 June 2005 18:06 (twenty years ago)

DL, have a look at my similarish thread: web authoring software. The results so far are at http://www.japanese-arts.net.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Wednesday, 22 June 2005 20:42 (twenty years ago)

one year passes...

argh!!!

Today I'm having to create a new page on a tables built site and it's killing me. I don't even remember how to layout with tables anymore!

I freakin' haaate doing maintence on old, horribly written sites. it ruins my damn day. this ones up for redesign but unfortunately there are three others in line in front of it. I just need to get this new content up. . .like doing a shot of something nasty.

― Ms Misery (MissMiseryTX), Thursday, 25 January 2007 17:30 (nineteen years ago)

have spent the day writing java to write html:

out.println("<span class="TitleSpan"><a href="TestArtistStats?id=" + artist.getId() + "">" + artist.getName() + "</a></span><br/>");

― Koogy Bloogies (koogs), Thursday, 25 January 2007 17:44 (nineteen years ago)

ha, didn't escape my escape characters. there are 4 of them, before 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 7th quotes

― Koogy Bloogies (koogs), Thursday, 25 January 2007 17:46 (nineteen years ago)

I spent a chunk of yesterday manhandling some php. It surpassed my knowledge, so our systems dude is going to help me clean it up. Yuck.

― molly mummenschanz (mollyd), Thursday, 25 January 2007 17:46 (nineteen years ago)

I freakin' haaate doing maintence on old, horribly written sites. it ruins my damn day. this ones up for redesign but unfortunately there are three others in line in front of it.

I'm *still* not as good at some CSS layouts as I am doing them with tables and I've been using CSS since netscape 4.

― UART variations (ex machina), Thursday, 25 January 2007 17:46 (nineteen years ago)

you must exorcise tables from your memory.

― Ms Misery (MissMiseryTX), Thursday, 25 January 2007 17:47 (nineteen years ago)

I'm lucky to work with talented HTML+CSS monkeys; They make templates. I write code that spits content into the template with id and class attributes and they mash it with CSS.

― UART variations (ex machina), Thursday, 25 January 2007 17:48 (nineteen years ago)

I think making the switch to all-CSS layout might have been harder for me if I hadn't been out of the web game awhile. When I started teaching in 2001 it was still "hey you should really starting using just CSS" and then when I returned to web dev. into 2004 it was "you must use only CSS-layout or suffer the consequences". It wasn't too hard changing then as I was rusty to begin with.

I tend to do more php/sql stuff in this job for the whole team as I'm the only one who likes it. But then we each have a set of sites we're responsible for on all angles - design, coding, etc.

I just hate stumbling through someone else's 5-yr old markup.

― Ms Misery (MissMiseryTX), Thursday, 25 January 2007 17:53 (nineteen years ago)

Was this from before the time when dog latin was having problems understanding ebay? Maybe there's some secret cache of these threads!

― mh. (mike h.), Thursday, 25 January 2007 18:06 (nineteen years ago)

I've been digging up old threads via categories lately as I figure it's kind of obnoxious to keep starting new ones.

perhaps some people find revival obnoxious.

― Ms Misery (MissMiseryTX), Thursday, 25 January 2007 18:08 (nineteen years ago)

Jon, regarding what we talked about...still in need! I can find some way to give credit to NYU interns or something. Some young programmer type who wants to learn about the record biz and good musics....

― Dan Selzer (Dan Selzer), Thursday, 25 January 2007 18:23 (nineteen years ago)

Ask Mike N?

― UART variations (ex machina), Thursday, 25 January 2007 19:16 (nineteen years ago)

Digging through somebody else's 5-year-old markup isn't so bad if it's clean; it feels so retro to find font tags and tables everywhere. But when it's spit out by some sort of Frontpage or Golive abomination it's so unpleasant. Why are there four font tags around things? Why so many mixed case, out-of-order, messy, no-closing-tag things around? And what the fuck is naturalsizeflag?

Tables are great for, you know, data that needs to be in tabular format.

― joygoat (joygoat), Thursday, 25 January 2007 20:33 (nineteen years ago)

Mike N has the connections?

― Dan Selzer (Dan Selzer), Thursday, 25 January 2007 20:52 (nineteen years ago)

Tables are great for, you know, data that needs to be in tabular format.

indeed, for this it definitely rocks. Just like unordered lists are great for, say, lists of links.

No most of my inherited code is painful b/c it was written by people who weren't very good even by past standards. I mean, FFS, how many nested tables can you have on one page??

― Ms Misery (MissMiseryTX), Thursday, 25 January 2007 20:55 (nineteen years ago)

Oh god, a hell of a lot. I was doing some sort of office job doing minor programming work around 2001ish and sat in on some "IT trainer" teaching some corporate dudes to use Frontpage. The guy was embedding tables inside tables all over the place, each with their own padding and spacing. Uuuugh.

― mh. (mike h.), Thursday, 25 January 2007 21:15 (nineteen years ago)

Do you guys do semantic markup?

― UART variations (ex machina), Thursday, 25 January 2007 22:26 (nineteen years ago)

what do you mean? semantic web stuff (which I'm not entirely sure what that is) or semantic in terms of "what is this element really doing? is it a list, is it a paragraph? is it a definition?" latter, yes.

― Ms Misery (MissMiseryTX), Thursday, 25 January 2007 22:27 (nineteen years ago)

Yea, the latter. I'm getting big into using that sort of thing as a first step in bootstrapping the real (capitalized) Semantic Web.

― UART variations (ex machina), Wednesday, 31 January 2007 03:25 (nineteen years ago)

see: http://microformats.org

― UART variations (ex machina), Wednesday, 31 January 2007 03:32 (nineteen years ago)

is xhtml 2.0 ever gonna happen, that's what I wanna know.

― ledge (ledge), Wednesday, 31 January 2007 09:53 (nineteen years ago)

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