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Andrew and Pete: Why are you advising me not to use Wordpress and to write the code myself? Is there a reason for that advice? What are the negative aspects of it?
MeepzorpSince you've made clear that you are comfortable with technical matters and code, and that you were wary of an automated approach, I think at least you should learn a little basic html skills. Because ultimately everything you publish, whether written yourself or using
help such as Wordpress, is translated in html. Trying it yourself allows you to understand "what's under the bonnet" (I think in the US you say "under the hood").
The disadvantage of
writing the html yourself is you won't easily be able to make beautiful layout styles easily that may need complex code. And you have to learn it, and it'll take more experimentation. For example when your webpage all turns bold after a certain point, you'll need to
search for where you omitted the command. There's no graphical user interface with html - you can't select text and click a "bold" button.
The advantage of
writing the html yourself is that a simple webpage should look exactly as you want. If you ask for a table with varying
column widths, with a picture to the right, that's exactly what you get. And you'll understand what's under the bonnet, so if something isn't right you can fix it yourself.
The advantages/disadvantages of programmed web page makers are the reciprocal of these.
Even if you decide on a WordPress approach, I think its useful, indeed essential, to understand html anyway, to know what's under the bonnet. I do recommend the w3schools tutorials as a
good way to get into html. So maybe the answer is to get some basic experience with html, and do some practice pages. Then switch to a programmed web page maker to produce easy and nice results.
By the way, if you've struggled through Fortran, then html will be a doddle. There's not much in it at a basic level. You will need a
good text processor, and I recommend htmlkit (find it via
Google). Htmlkit colour codes the different sorts of html commands, ensuring you don't lose that I used as an example! Even better, you can preview your webpage as you are
writing it.
I do worry a
bit however when you say your PC doesn't have a word processor. Not so much because you need one, but because you've apparently never downloaded a free word processor such as Opendoc. If you are getting into web page publishing, you'll need to be comfortable with downloading and using
tools such as htmlkit, and with searching for
help, which may need you to download other things. I've made the same point about your photo editing program - you need to download and personally evaluate various
tools, and if necessary know how to uninstall programmed that are not for you. And many programmes will require up to date operating systems or web browsers to
work well, including necessary plugins such as Java. You can write html on a basic Windows XP machine, and htmlkit will
work on such a machine, but I couldn't guarantee that XP with IE6 (if this is what you have) will be suitable for everything.
