The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #129111 Message #2896742
Posted By: Desert Dancer
29-Apr-10 - 12:40 PM
Thread Name: Tech: Running a Website (HTML Practice Grande)
Subject: RE: Tech: Running a Website (HTML Practice Grande)
I am a jack of all trades (and master of none) who is becoming more and more of a web specialist because it's the most saleable of my skills... I was originally involved in the "information architecture" (as in, someone else did the actual coding) of a website for Tucson Friends of Traditional Music (tftm.org, now sadly neglected). With an admin. asst. job at the University of Arizona I got into doing it all myself. Self-taught. Several sites I didn't start from scratch, but upgrade the code and maintain the content.
How best to learn depends on how you best learn... lately, I'm feeling like the more I know the harder it's getting. I think that's because I know more of what's possible, and what's possible often isn't particularly easy.
I use Dreamweaver + hand-coding (Dreamweaver has some handy shortcuts, and I always have hands on the code).
The Drupal (and others) content management system (with a web interface for php-MySQL functioning) is a great thing for having something that non-techies can maintain content for. But, someone has to build it and keep the back-end up to date. The TFTM folks are mostly using some blog host for the pretty part of the site - a similar idea, but more limited in its functioning.