How everyone made their sites

[apblue]

Just to satisfy my own curiosity and because I'm sure a lot of other people are curious as well just post how you made your website. Whether you used a program such as Dreamweaver, Frontpage etc or coded it yourself. Or if you hired someone else to do it.

I use Dreamweaver 8 for the initial design on all my sites and code all the PHP myself. I look online for tutorials and example scripts and customize them from there. After awhile you start remembering how its all put together

[T. Wheeler]

Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Notepad

[topsites]

I did code it myself with CuteHtml (better than notepad lol) but I didn't do it from scratch, I can not do that.

First, I spent about a year taking pictures and collecting articles and stuff.

I used a template but before that, I went and used someplace on Yahoo Local (I can't find it anymore but it's in there) where all I did was spend 15-20 minutes filling in the blanks and making choices, and it designed a basic site for me.

So then between template and Yahoo, I made one out of the two.
To get the html straight (I use only validated Xhtml 1.0), although I type most of my code already to the standard, I am only human and rest assured I make plenty of mistakes, so I ran it through here:
http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/

Which, it doesn't like my menus, somedays I hate this stuff.

[Turf Troll]

I started at the end of last year with a Yahoo Hosting site and their site builder. I bought Dreamweaver but the season came on before I got the box opened. But with some tips from topsites and unlimited landscaping, plus reading all the seo threads I have been getting enough business to drop all my paper ads, they where bleeding me with the dollars spent and the marginal return.

[T. Wheeler]

Turf Troll you might want to ditch yahoo. Go with godaddy.com hosting. Yahoo has been know to crash often out of no where. Sometimes twice a week or sometimes maybe 3 months before it happens. GoDaddy has crashed on me once .

[BSDeality]

I use a CMS and created my own template for it from scratch in VI.

[apblue]

I see your using the Etomite CMS, haven't heard to much about it but it seems to work well for you, how do you like it?

[BSDeality]

I like it a lot, very flexible, yet not too much bloat that I don't need for a small site like mine. it runs off mysql, although I believe it will run off any sql style db. I couldn't be without the flexibility it offers.

[Pro-Scapes]

my first few sites I used dreamweaver and fireworks. This time I paid a friend to do it. I cant run my business and stay current with all the newest fastest code like he can. Night and day diff.

[topsites]

Originally Posted by Turf Troll

I started at the end of last year with a Yahoo Hosting site and their site builder. I bought Dreamweaver but the season came on before I got the box opened. But with some tips from topsites and unlimited landscaping, plus reading all the seo threads I have been getting enough business to drop all my paper ads, they where bleeding me with the dollars spent and the marginal return.

I hear you, I have ONE paper in my big city that gives me a half decent return for my money, and it's not the main paper and there are dozens of these small publications, took time and money to find the one that worked.

Next year thou, I plan on spending the $300 / year it costs to be listed in the Yahoo directory and like yourself, if I can't drop the paid ads fine, but it should help. I would do it this year, but when Yahoo approves a site, they first list it under 'New Sites' for a week, and you will get much more traffic in that first week than any other time, so I am timing it for next spring for that reason.
Which, they still have to approve it first, but anyway ...

I always wondered about the quality of customer ...
Seeing what you just said, that helps my decision a lot.
Mainly because Yahoo's fee is recurring, $300 / year is peanuts but still...