Are you looking to build your own website, yet you want to reduce your internet connection time? This is a guide for you to build your own website offline.
I have been building websites since 1996. The first few websites were developed on my school’s server. Back in the days when you can just sit back in a computer and type away.
Believe it or not, my favorite website coding tool is TextPad (a variable of Notepad but with so much more text editing functions). After experimenting with Microsoft Frontpage I noticed that Frontpage has its limitations, and when you get to advanced scripting for your website, you will notice that Frontpage even changes your code!
Anyway, getting back to build your own website offline, you must chose an website editor to work with. For many people, including myself, I like to use a WYSIWYG editor (WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What You Get). WYSIWYG editors include the well-know Microsoft Frontpage and Macromedia Dreamweaver editors. Both are not free, although Frontpage usually comes installed on your computer. With a WYSIWYG editor you are given an interface for you to design your website. You may drag and drop pictures, draw tables, and change font style and size as you wish. You can also view the HTML code that’s behind your design if you want to do some fine tuning.
If you are on a budget and do not have one of the two WYSIWYG editors aforementioned, you may simply do a search for “free html editor” in the search engine
To build your own website offline, you will need to save all of your website files locally on your computer. Once you are done designing your website and webpages, you are then ready to upload (or publish, as Frontpage calls it) it to your web server. Since you are to build your own website offline, you actually do not need to be connected to the internet. The only time you would need to logon to the internet (if you are still using a dial-up, I can understand) would be to publish your web pages online, or to go online to find HTML references for design questions and help.
There is absolutely nothing wrong to build your own website offline. However, when you get to complicated web development projects that require interaction with the web server (such as database applications), it would be wise to build your own website online, or at least build your own website offline with Frontpage and have it publish to your web server whenever design changes are made to your website so you may see the immediate effect of it.
This article is also related to “build your own website with drag and drop”