oblaat
a guide to conceiving, creating & publishing your own website
a guide to conceiving, creating & publishing your own website
As with any hobby, you will need a starter kit of sorts. Baking with no flour in your pantry, for example, is a death sentence.
There are a few things you will "need" to make a website, but by technicality, you already have what you need: your computer's Notepad app. This is genuinely all that is needed to create a website. In reality though, you probably want something with more features, and you will need some other programs to help the process.
After all, any new artist will go online to ask which materials and software will fast track them to success, and somebody getting into plastic model kits will inevitably wonder what the best nippers to buy are going to be.
I will only introduce software that you can obtain for free.
You already have one of these if you're reading this. Still, it's a good thing to keep multiple in mind, as people use different browsers, and different browsers display things differently!
Here I will explain the two most popular browsers.
Firefox is a web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation. It has many forks, and somebody might go for a more privacy-focused version of it or just one that appeals to them, but it is a solid web browser.
It uses an engine called Gecko.
Chrome is a web browser developed by Google. It has Google integration and is a very popular pick for people browsing the Web. There are also many forks of it, all running on what's called Chromium.
Importantly, it uses an engome called Blink. This is different from the one Firefox uses, which means they work in different ways.
This is why it is important to look at your website in at least two browsers whenever you make major changes to it. Something that works in one might not work in the other!
These are nicer ways to edit your files, which are in reality made of "plain text".
Like Notepad, but with tabs and some basic auto-complete. It works well and is very lightweight, making it a very good choice for beginners and advanced developers alike.
VS Code is a program for writing any sort of code in. You can write any sort of code in Notepad++ too, but VS Code is a little more professional, and has all the features of Notepad++ and more.
There are two versions of VS Code: a version with telemetry (Microsoft spying on you) and one without, called VSCodium. I recommend using this version, because it's all of the good without the bad.
You can download VSCodium here.
You can download VS Code here.
These are programs you can use to make and edit graphics for your website.
This one is a classic. Like MS Paint, but with a little more... in fact, with a lot more. It's simple, but it works, and I recommend it to anybody who needs it. Only available for Windows computers.
This is not the cream of the crop as far as both art software and an image editing software go, but you can do many great things with it, and you can download it for free.
The GIMP—GNU Image Manipulation Program—is a famously free and open source image editing program, although it is not well suited for art.
One of the default "free art programs" out there, and it's much easier to learn than GIMP. Highly recommended.
Like Adobe Photoshop, but entirely online, and entirely for free. Extremely powerful and useful for effects not included in less fully-featured programs.
FileZilla is a software good for accessing files over FTP, which stands for File Transfer Protocol. FTP is useful for putting all your files onto your server with only one click.