website direction?...

[CrAz3D]

I'm looking to create a site for my college republicans organization.
The one we have now (http://nmsu.collegerepublicans.org) is lame, depressing, and highly unoriginal.

If y'all would be able to point me to a very customizable layout that has features for news, photo galleries, as well as a user database (so we can let people join and send them emails, although Facebook works nicely for this, too) I'd appreciate it!

OR, what I'd like to do even more so would be to design my/our own...this would be harder as I'm the most php literate person in the group (and I don't know it ;))...figured a php site utilizing mysql is something that we'd want.

Thoughts/susgestions/direction/help?

<3!

p.s. would need to find a host also

[Ender]

http://w3schools.com -- tutorials for everything web-related

And of course, don't forget to look at pages' client-side code, i.e. HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc.

HTML and CSS make a nice site. PHP's very useful for server-side stuff and dynamic stuff, like a content management system (CMS), databases, emailing... etc., so you'd probably want to use it. You have to find web hosting that supports PHP, but just about all of them do... Javascript can be useful but it's not nearly as useful as PHP. It's client-side and thus you can do stuff dynamically without having to ask the server which calls for some kind of reload time. Also, since it's client-side, there are of course no requirements from the server. JS is especially nifty when used with DOM. People usually find very little use for javascript on their sites... but when used well it makes a difference.

I'd recommend making it on your own, and I'd suggest first using HTML, CSS, and PHP. Once you start learning these things you can post questions on the design of the web site, e.g. the layout, the content management, etc. But two things that are big and help answer your questions are divs and spans in CSS (layout) and includes in PHP (content management).

[trust]

I'll do it. For one million dollars.

[MyndFyre]

The latest app page I built for Red Bull (http://www.redbullflugtagusa.com/Nashville/peoples-choice.aspx) was featured on Xbox.com, Joystiq, and Bungie.net.  :D

I just wanted to throw that out there.  ;-)