Hi. I know absolutely nothing about building a web site but wanted to make one for my dog. (Hmm, that sounds weird. How about I wanted to find something new as a hobby and decided to make a web site with my dog as the theme?)

I want to start off small and be able to add to it as I find out how to do new things. An information page, a gallery page(s), a page with videos, a blog, a link to a web cam live feed, and a links page. I would like to eventually learn how to do very basic animations- to have a balloon that rises for 5-10 seconds, then just repeats itself, or where you take a photo and have the subject in the photo jump up and down. Just low level stuff.

Do I just need the Visual Site Designer for this? Or do I need extra packages too? If I buy a theme on the site can I alter bits of it if I need to or add to it?

Thank you

Hiya B.P.,

Sounds like a few things you might need here, but the main ones I'm seeing would be VSD (if you don't plan to learn HTML or CSS coding that is, if you do then you will also want the HTML Editor) and Photo Gallery. You may also want to check out the S-Drive for a couple things such as the blog which is a built in stream on it, and for a place to put your site at a reasonable price too.

The animation thing you'll probably want to get something like Corel/Jasc's Animation Shop 3. CoffeeCups animation program may also work for this, but alas I've never tried it so I don't know if it makes animations or just edits the images, but give it a trial run and see if it does what you need too. There are a lot of image sites out there too that you may want to do some searching for. Lots of sites that provide reasonably priced animations and graphics and I think there's a thread or 2 here on the forums about it. Do a search here for it and you may find that thread that has a lot of links in it.

Other than that, this should get you pretty well started, and if you do decide later to learn the coding end of it, the HTML Editor is one of the top editors out there, voted number 1 by About.com... again

Good luck on your site and holler at us if you need assistance, lots of VSD users here if you decide to go that way as well as coders if you decide to use HTML Editor.

CoffeeCup has a Web video player, a Photo Gallery, a Flash Blogger and a Web cam, so you can extend the site quite a bit after you have created the basics. All CoffeeCup programmes play nicely together, and if you ever get stuck, just holler and one of the people residing in these forums will be there right away.

Oh hi, we seem to be following each other around here, Jo Ann Just FYI, the CoffeeCup Animation prog. does create animations.

B.P., I think VSD will get what you want. Start out with the trial version and kick the tires a few times. Website about dog sounds great. Did you get your dog a Facebook page?

Thanks for the replies. Think I'll start with VSD, Webcam, and Photo Gallery then branch into the HTML editor. I'll also check out the other forums for the thread about reasonably priced animations and graphics to get me a few bits quickly then I can slowly see if it's something I can add to later.

hehe Inger, we must have been on the save wave length Thanks on the info about the Gif Animator, wasn't quite sure if it created them or not and now I know.

Good luck B.P. I think you'll enjoy VSD a lot, I see a lot of great comments about it all the time, many happy users