Website Nudge for the Non-designer

Been busy.  Obviously NOT on this blog but decided to get on it and get with it.  Like wanting to change around the furniture in the living room, I've been revisiting revising my website AGAIN.  

Worked on photoshop CS3 making images like what I've posted here and stopped there.  So my poor website has been under construction for over a year. *sigh*

With that and reading books (my true passion), I decided to nudge myself and look for what's out there that I can create without spending so much time crunching code.  

I checked out wix.  It's a free flash website builder.  I was drawn to the artsy sites with lots of color.  The premium version where you use your own domain is NOT free.  The free one is posted on their site and with ads. Hmmm.  Flexibility to create a unique site with all the bells and whistles with ads and attached to the wix site.  Nice to play with but not for me.

Then onto google apps.  Last year, I built a small 3 page site for a local tutoring center.  It's now defunct so had to take down the pages,  BUT it introduced me to google apps.  The website building is fairly straight forward.  Use the templates available, easy to use but no tweaking code to customize.  You can use your own domain in the free standard edition, with some limits.  Premium edition is for bigger and more robust needs. 

My creative spirit then complained that there wasn't enough flexibility in customizing the google apps sites.  So I found csszengarden.com.  It's a site that was built to teach how to use css to build websites.  NICE.  The HTML code is the same but each example site has different css attached which changes the style.  Therefore, easy to update the site and content. 

I think I'll play with css just to learn something new, but I decided to go with google apps for now.