By reignlight on

I am in the process of learning how to design a web page for the first time. It will be used for very small business purposes with no more than 30 people accessing the site at any given point in time max. I will avoid Joomla (sp) due to its limited number of logins what I discovered reading another post. I'm getting ready to learn basic HTML/CSS scripting then will get into learning PHP and differing languages from there. I also have absolutely no programming background whatsoever. I discovered this site thinking that they merely offered free web templates that I could use to get my feet wet while learning these programming languages for web design. Now I'm discovering, it seems, that this is software to be used for website content management. I will have access to Dreamweaver but want to try and avoid wysiwyg web editors to some degree so as to not become dependent upon them. Not just this but I assume that my time is limited in learning how to build a site and to have it functional.... so to some extent using a web editor might be helpful in the beginning stages.

What exactly is Drupal and what can it do for me? I would prefer that responses avoid as much technical jargon as possible so that I can understand what is being spoken. I love the idea of having an editable template to start with and then to add additional features and content as my knowledge progresses in web design. Eventually I want the ability to implement flash/java content for audio & video content & for flashy motion effects in templates, ect when I am skilled in that regard. Anyways, I'm jumping all over the place so perhaps someone on here could help me grasp a better understanding of how this could work for me. Right now we are hosted with valueweb and to me the name itself scares me with their hosting capabilities though I actually have no idea if they were work for our needs in the long haul.

Any direction for learning tools (especially books on learning the languages would be especially useful - killersites.com and their method of teaching works great for me) would be greatly appreciated also.

Feel free to email a direct reply to me at either reignlight@yahoo.com or mowsers@gmail.com if you'd like

- Wayne

Comments

ricardo.wing’s picture

ricardo.wing commented

well... I'm kind of new in DRUPAL... but I can recoment you to learn LOT OF CSS before you start developing a new page... CSS is one powerful tool for changing html properties... you can get some information of CSS searching for "CSS ANTOLOGY" by Rachel Andrew...

And Drupal is a tool to administrate content of your page... I can give you details but I can tell you that is of great help to manage your side whit it...

good look in your search...

michelle’s picture

michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

This is a good place to start learning about Drupal. Not too jargony. http://drupal.org/handbook/is-drupal-right-for-you

Michelle

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My site: http://shellmultimedia.com

obiyoda’s picture

obiyoda commented

I found even though I have done a bit of CSS and HTML even took a class in it. But the css stuff really started to make sense for me when I started developing with firebug https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843 . So if you aren't using firefox get it and use firebug to help you learn and look at other peoples code.