WebUser – 21 August 2019

Weekend Project

Get to grips with some serioustech tinkering to

boost your computer andotherdevices

58 21 Aug - 3 Sept 2019

(bluegriffon.org). This letsyou design

your website offline, so it’s readyfor

whenwe start lookingat domains and

web hosting in the second part of this

project next Issue.

If you haven’t heard of BlueGriffon, it’s

a free advancedwebsite creator built

around Gecko, Firefox’s rendering engine.

It offers all the editingfeaturesyou’d

expect, and a wizard-basedtemplate you

can useto getstarted. It’s idealfor web

Howto

...

In the first of a two-part series, Wayne Williams explains how to work

out a design, use templates and get to grips with web-building tools

What you’ll need
There are plenty ofweb-based drag-and-
drop designers that letyou puttogether
a good-looking site in minutes and check
that it displays properly inevery possible
browsercombination. Manyeven offerto
host the finished sitefor free – or until
you buy a domain and hosting package
of your own. For this first part of the
project, though,we’ll lookat howto build
a website using theexcellent BlueGriffon

W

hen the web first took off in the 1990s, there

were just two ways of building a site: you could

use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is WhatYou

Get) edit or such as Microsoft FrontPage, or code it by

hand in HTML. The situati on has got a lot more

complicated since then, with numerous web-base d

builders such as Weebly ( http://www.weebly.com ) and Wix

(www.wix.com) cropping up, and different types of

scre ens – computers, games consoles, web-enabl ed TVs,

tablets and mobile phones – to consider when

designing your site. If you’ve beenthinkingof

creating your own websit e for a while but

haven’t been sure where to start, this

two-part project will get you up and

running in notime at all. In this

issue, we’ll beginby

looki ng at how to

design your site.

designers of all abilities becauseyou can

quicklyswitch betweenWYSIWYG and

Source (HTML) views. We’ll showyou

howto getstarted in our MiniWorkshop,

opposite.

Somefeatures, such as theresponsive

designtool (which changes the site’s

layout dynamicallyto suit the display

you’re viewing it on), areavailable only in

the paid-for edition. Ifyou decideyou

need thesefeatures,you’ll have to pay

M T W T F S S

Create your own website from

scratch Part 1: Design the site