I have been dedicating the last month or so to setting up a home LAMP server, to host PHP/MySQL sites and static sites and blogs using FTP. Now I need to get back to the busines of creating web pages. By far the easiest way to build a site for the first time is to use a ready made template. Many blogging services such as Blogger and WordPress provide simple templates ready to use with a Blogspot or WordPress hosted blog. These same templates can be used on your own domains, however they are often lacking a little in design and style, and of course, a unique template is essential to make you site stand out.
So, how to start? Open Source of course. There are many sites on the internet that collect and distribute offer open source templates. The nature of open source is that many of the templates appear on many different sites. The sites that I have found most useful are:
Andreas Viklund Free Web templates
and
In addition to open source, there are some simple examples of general template layouts that use HTML/CSS, such as pmob and a selection of 3 column templates on Incutio.
One you have chosen a template, download and save all the various parts to a new directory, and then you can start to play and test them. Remember, to view a website in development all you have to do is open the index.html file in a browser. Just right click, open with… Firefix (for example) and then you can view the page. As you make changes to the layout, content, you just have to hit F5 to refresh the page. Play with the CSS if you are feeling brave, to change the colours, size of borders etc. etc.
