Hi There,

 

I have recently been doing Team Tree House courses and loving them. I am starting to pick up the basics of coding quickly therefore progressing at a fast pace. The only thing is that I want to start doing my own work, building some websites to practise etc... I am unsure as to where to start, what CMS to use etc...

 

Could someone point me in the right direction please? Or give me some advice?

 

That would be much appreciated

 

Many Thanks,

Start with just plain old HTML and CSS and build a site for yourself - get the basics right before moving on to more advanced stuff. Practice making navigation, responsive layouts, forms and the like, and master them.

 

For choosing a CMS, well pick up any one and play with it to see if it suits you, Craft and ExpressionEngine both have free core versions you can install and play with, and of course there are a myriad of others that suit many types of site. Different CMS's suit different clients and sites so it can help to be well versed in more than one.

Thank you for your advice I do appreciate it.

 

Just one quick question, when 'building the sites' is that done on the CMS or do I need to do it on text editor and get some form of server to test it out?

 

Thanks,

Generally speaking CMS's use templates, which are a mixture of code, HTML and CSS. The type of code will depend on the CMS, for instance Craft uses the "Twig" templating system, ExpressionEngine uses it's own system, other systems like Drupal use raw PHP.

 

When you build a site using a CMS you have two key parts - you set up things like publishing channels, custom fields, categories etc in the CMS, then you adapt the templates to output whatever data you publish.

 

How you edit templates is up to you, many CMS's offer template editing inside the app, most typically allow you to upload template files that you can edit in any text editor.

 

There's no hard and fast rule as to how you do it, really the best approach is start playing with a few CMS's and see which ones you get on with.

You can make an html page and then convert it to a CMS theme, or you can write it as a theme straight off, but the first option might be less confusing. You can display your html in a browser and see what you are doing without any server as you know. You are correct that to display a site on a CMS will require a server environment.

 

For CMS theme development you would install wampserver under windows, or whatever the mac and linux equivalents are. That will give you a local version of apache, mysql and php to simulate a webserver.

 

However you go about it a text editor is the way it's done.

 

Re. making some real sites - there are plenty of clubs, charities, Parish Councils and the like who badly need web presence or upgraded sites. What are you interested in? Who do you want to help?

 

If you are making a design you are proud of you can distribute it as a free template or better still as a free CMS theme. kudos if you are going to work professionally. Look here for instance

http://get-simple.info/extend/all_themes.php

That's a CMS where converting an html page to a theme is really very simple

Edited June 21, 20179 yr by TimW

Thank you very much, I appreciate your input

You can make an html page and then convert it to a CMS theme, or you can write it as a theme straight off, but the first option might be less confusing. You can display your html in a browser and see what you are doing without any server as you know. You are correct that to display a site on a CMS will require a server environment.

 

For CMS theme development you would install wampserver under windows, or whatever the mac and linux equivalents are. That will give you a local version of apache, mysql and php to simulate a webserver.

 

However you go about it a text editor is the way it's done.

 

Re. making some real sites - there are plenty of clubs, charities, Parish Councils and the like who badly need web presence or upgraded sites. What are you interested in? Who do you want to help?

 

If you are making a design you are proud of you can distribute it as a free template or better still as a free CMS theme. kudos if you are going to work professionally. Look here for instance

http://get-simple.info/extend/all_themes.php

That's a CMS where converting an html page to a theme is really very simple

 

Thank you TimW this has been really helpful. I am going to play around with a CMS like Joomla or WP to see how things go.

 

Alternatively, I am into photography, building portfolios, music and generic creative activities. My mother is a Speech and Language therapist and she needs a website built and designed so I can imagine that will be my first project. If she has already bought a domain can I use that on any CMS?

 

Cheers,

 

...If she has already bought a domain can I use that on any CMS?

 

 

Yes. In addition to the domain you will need some space on a server (eg hosting).

 

Here's a quick video of someone called Tim installing a CMS a couple of years ago. It's easy.

https://youtu.be/6JgG6_VI4DU

Edited June 21, 20179 yr by TimW

What are your end goals?

Do you want a job in the industry or do you want to freelance?

If the former decide whether you like frontend or backend more and once you have learnt the absolute basics of both focus 100% on that one area. You can transition to a more full stack role as you advance. But to try and learn full-stack from the beginning to an employable standard will take you much longer.

 

For frontend just focus on HTML, CSS, JS. Don't worry about PHP or CMS etc.

For backend find a backend language you like PHP, JS, Java, Python and focus on that plus databases SQL and NoSQL. Stay away from CMS systems or frameworks until you know the language well.

Edited June 21, 20179 yr by rbrtsmith