Rainhat – the band

Coding a website

I’ve started making myself a cool website. All big, successful bands have fancy websites, so it seems like kind of a requisite if you want to be a big band. That way people can easily download your music, read stuff about the band, see if the band is coming to their town, and so on, I’m sure you know. I want to be a successful musician, obviously, so I decided to get a website too. I looked around online and found some sites where you can sign up for a free website, then easily create a fancy page without having to know anything about html or css and stuff, and tadah! There’s a fancy website. I tried some of them out. Sure, it’s free, but you get a big, fat, blinking ad at the top of your page. I deleted that one and tried another one. No ads. Pretty good. The easy drag-and-drop editing was easy enough, but incredibly annoying after a while. There’s a fairly basic template, and you can change this, this and that, but nothing else. There’s so little stuff you can actually customize that the result is bound to be one out of a million very similar variations on the exact same theme. A page that is identical to the one three thousand other people have, just made in a different color and with a different font. Lame. I deleted that one too. The others I found were pretty much the same stuff. I guess I have to do it the harder way.

Ok, I used to know a thing or two about making websites and html coding and stuff, so I opened up a blank text file and wrote html and body at the top in angle brackets. Then what? I guess my html is a bit rusty. I looked up a few html tutorial websites for reference and went at it again with the code. Slowly I managed to type up a bunch of code that looked fairly decent in a browser. Not bad, but nowhere good enough. I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so I want a great looking website, not just a decent one. Apparently I suck more than I thought at html, so I googled some website editing software. I’ve used Frontpage before and remember it being pretty good. But all the good programs, like Dreamweaver and Expressions Web are quite expensive. I don’t have that kind of cash to put on a program. I found an open source one called Kompozer. It does what it’s supposed to, more or less, but it’s quite lacking in functionality compared to all the fancy stuff you could do with Frontpage.

Next option. I found a website with really nice looking website templates for free. Well made, good looking and completely free, so I downloaded one that I like. I can easily customize the template to look the way I want it to. It’s way easier to change a code that’s already there than to write it yourself to look the way you want it. It’s still going to take a bit of tampering, but I have a cool website in progress. Then I just have to find a place to host it, get a domain, and put it up.