Just a little brief history…. About 6 months ago, I decided to dive into opening a side business company, Ocean Bay Services, Inc. that initially was to be a Marine Concierge company that now has had a few twists and turns. I then created a DBA called The Northeast View - www.thenortheastview.com which is a Northeast travel related website…

I am using Network Solutions as my hosting service. My Package came with one license or instance of their website builder called Image Café. I actually like their tools and services, but the website builder is not as free format as other Html editors. In addition I can only create one website using their tool. However I can have 100’s of sites if I build them and upload to their servers and attach my domains.

I found Coffee Cup searching editors and used the trial version, I then cut and pasted into my building blocks within Network Solutions. I have since purchased their entire suite.

Now I am looking into niche Affiliate Marketing and will be creating many web sites. What is the preferred method for building a site? Using a theme, a template or start blank page and bring your own graphics in ? I tested a couple of themes and they seem to come with more baggage than I need. But maybe I just don’t understand many of the functions. As I said I am very new to this.

What a question. I suspect there are as many different answers as there are people doing this. Everyone will have their own way of doing things.

I start by building the home page, keeping the CSS with the page (this seems a faster way to make changes). Once I am finished with the page and it looks like I want it to look, I remove the CSS and put it in a separate file. I then start the second page essentially using what I developed for the home page as a template.

If every page will have the same stuff at the top (masthead), I copy all that to another file and use server-side programming to let the server add it to each page as it is called by the browser. I also do this for the site navigation menu and the footer of each page.

I expect others will weigh in with their methods. All methods that work will be the correct method for the person that feel comfortable using that method.

Yes I know that this was a very general question with many answers. So far I tried all and seem to work with various degrees of functionality. I created a Project under Websites and used a theme which created my main folder along with a CSS, JS and Images folder. In addition it created various pages as part of the theme. I copied the Index.html page and created Page 2 3 etc.

When creating from Blank or a Form, I did not get the CSS and JS folders. Frankly I have no clue at this time, but will soon as I am determined to learn this stuff. I understand that CSS is to divide HTML and Colors , font s etc for better accessibility. Not sure what the Java Script is used for. I have created a bunch of very simple 2-3 pages sites using a very simple method.

What I have been doing is first creating an index home page and then other pages as needed in a folder along with my image file. I then created links to the other pages for navigation. I uploaded to the Network Solutions host server and used their tools to point to my folder and I had lift off.

In a demo that I saw recently, the person was creating links to pages for contact, privacy, terms etc and he created some of the pages as .htm Is there a difference as I have been using only .html ?

There is no difference between htm and html extensions. Some servers seem to want at least for the index file that it has the html extension.

hi TNEV

Yep - you have the css right - its used for styling elements on your page and for positioning them too...

The javaScripts are used by the browser to do the fancy bits like pop out menus or things that move or interact - also used for loading up any flash files these days...

You should be able to use the same css files and javascript files on more than one page - eg have one (or 2) css file(s) that get used for the whole site...

so using the initial pages created and copying them to make other pages is the right idea They'll have bits of code at the top that fetch the css and js

I am using the the new HTML editor and it keeps freezing (not responding) I am running windows vista business
Anybody got any ideas on what the problem could be. The 2008 one seemed to work just fine on the same system