website making!!

[shiato storm]

just been asked some advice in making a website, ok not too difficult. it'll proably be reasonably basic but just wondering; how do i set something up that you can add to - like this forum where you add a message and it just gets tacked on to the bottom or top depending on how you see it. thinking for front page of the site how to add news as it comes in etc.
is that easy to do? not sure how to implement something like that so would appreciate a little input.
basically after a setup that can be added to easily without requiring dramatic moving of pages off/on a server every time!

oh and i've never made a site before! so any helpful advice gratefully received!

[DavidM]

2 possibilites - either a CMS (essentially a database driven site) or use a Blog.

[Nick F]

I would use a CMS if I was you. I use one on my website and it's fantastic. You get a real nice looking site and everything is so easy to control from the backend.

[DavidM]

If you go for a blog, i'd suggest WordPress - as it's definately one of the better....

[directhex]

just been asked some advice in making a website, ok not too difficult. it'll proably be reasonably basic but just wondering; how do i set something up that you can add to - like this forum where you add a message and it just gets tacked on to the bottom or top depending on how you see it. thinking for front page of the site how to add news as it comes in etc.
is that easy to do? not sure how to implement something like that so would appreciate a little input.
basically after a setup that can be added to easily without requiring dramatic moving of pages off/on a server every time!

oh and i've never made a site before! so any helpful advice gratefully received!

the important thing to bear in mind here is that you can't do what you want to do with just HTML. a basic web server has one job - listen out for browsers saying "send me this file please", and to reply with "okay, have this file". if you want to do anything more than that, your server needs to be smarter - more specifically, it needs to understand browsers saying "send me this file plase, oh and by the way, here's some extra info". in the normal case, the file is a confirmation page, the extra info is the data to verify and do something with.

the usual method is an active server language - the most common option is PHP, but there are also things like ASP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, WebObjects, SafePerl, Ruby, and many more. you write scripts which generate HTML pages on the fly, and send them back - for example, by reading content from a database or plain text files - then send the HTML as if it were a normal flat .htm file

there are plenty of off-the-shelf options for what you want to do, such as blogging software or a simple CMS. or you could learn a language and write your own (being careful of security, of course). either way, if you don't have an active-language-capable server, give up now.