[gigglebite]

Where could I find a Website maker for (Current and Past Student)

In which they could upload their own pictures, enter their name, and anything they wanted to say? Forum, Blogs, and so on.

I wanted to make a High School website.

[RickJ]

Almost any web design software will work... but the good news is that you can get the best there is for relatively cheap. Dreamweaver. If you are a student (or you have a student in the household) you can get the Academic version for about $180. Or an older version (like DreamweaverMX) for even cheaper.

From there all you need is a domain name (a dot com, dot org etc) which will run you about $8 a year, and hosting, which will run $60-$100 a year depending on who you choose.

(There are scads of free web space sites out there, but for something as potentiall big and feature full as you describe, they'll probably not work for you.)

Just my opinion: You can find web design software as cheap as $50 on the shelf of your local software store, but within a few months, you'd find yourself wishing you'd spent the $180 for the software that will do everything you want.

... and as for a forum, one of the best ones out there is free:
http://www.simplemachines.org/ You'd use it in conjunction with your site.

Hope that helps with the basics.

[LTheobald]

As usual, I have to start my threads on a downer. Do you have any HTML experience? If not, don't expect this to be something easy. A site like this will need to be tied to a database and be managed closely if it's doing to be a success.

I wouldn't go for free web space. For a site like this you will need a lot of space, a lot of bandwidth and a good backend database. You won't get this with free providers.

If you don't have any HTML experience, you build this kind of site but it won't be easy. I'd start by finding a CMS (content management system) that you like and attempting to build your site in that: Google search for CMS' I'd go with Mambo or Drupal if your webserver supports PHP.

[RickJ]

LT, I'm curious. I know CMS is big... but are typical CMS apps as easy to learn as something like Dreamweaver or FrontPage?

[LTheobald]

I think it's a 50/50 case. You'd get a better site with DreamWeaver but it would take more time to create and update. The CMS would restrict you more in what you could do but it would be a lot easier to make changes. As for "learning" - are the wizard's in DreamWeaver really teaching you that much? Either way you'd need to sit down and learn some HTML to understand what either system is doing.

[RickJ]

A couple things to consider, then, gigglebite: I found Dreamweaver easy to learn. If you can find a cheap older version of it, it's definitely worth having around.

AS LT pointed out, though, the bottom line is that you'll be learning new software.

[missmooey]

If you want a site that gives you that abilities (blogs/pages per user) and a place to edit and work everything out, I wouldn't start it from scratch. I would use a CMS system - there are many of them available, like Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress.

Since you want something relatively complex (each person should have a blog and a community), you could either use drupal (but that sometims requires a bit of extended knowledge, I find) or Joomla with a something like jomSocial extension. The extension costs money ($100 a year) but it's realtively cheap and Joomla is free.

It's also very VERY easy to configure once you get the hang of things, and will give you all the power you require with the ability to let your users edit their own pages (and for you to control user access, articles, etc).