Free tools, a commitment to and a word of caution

As I've previously said I'm going to try to build this blog and the site as inexpensily as possible.  Currely I am used to using adobe's bloated and overpriced web managment suite.  In the last few years many free open source tools have been released that provide many of the functions avalible in adobes creative suite. This blog affords me the oppurtinity to gradually build up my famalarity and profecency with these tools, it is my intent to show how to use these tools to develop, build, and manage a blog and then an entire site.  I will post reviews of the free programs I try and guides to to the tools I end up using.  A general note when a free program or tool is unfamiliar to make sure to check its veracity, while no where near as bad as it used to be (thank you Google:) ) some "free" programs are any thing but providing unscrupulous developers an easy way to introduce malicious code onto your computer or worse yet your site.  Google has done a relatively good job cleaning up their search results but it pays to be careful and to do at least some cursory research before making use of a program.  Some simple things to look for are reviews from third party resources the more trusted the better, make sure read reviews from more than one source as on occasion you will run across false reviews. 

Why Blogger and Why am I'm Doing a Blog

The choice to use Blogger and let the blog exist here was a conscious decision the idea is to have the blog exist off site.  I've used both Wordpress and Blogger in the past and I chose blogger for this particular project because its absolutely painless (relativity speaking) to set up plus its free and one of the goals was to do this as cheaply as possible without sacrificing quality. If in the future this blog receives a lot of traffic, something I'm not expecting, then a move might be considered but for now Blogger is the perfect developmental environment.  I have to make one disclaimer, I'm not 100% fluent in Blogger I've played around with it a few times in the past and found it quick and easy at the same time it provides easy accessibly to its underlying html.  Rolling your eyes yet at the one of the most intimating subjects for beginners ie html don't!  Any thing that I show you how do to in html I will spell out and keep easy.
        So now that this blog is started before we dive into building a site lets set up the blog and get it web ready.  Many of the aspects of setting up a blog are transferable to web-site creation and with blogger its easy to demonstrate these subjects.  Think of setting up a blog as an introduction, and a get way to learn some basic techniques that are highly transferable.  I strongly recommend anyone who is just starting their "web education" to start with a blog, share it with you friends and family, make you mistakes on it, and learn from it.  Blogs have been intentionally streamlined to allow novice user to quickly increase their understanding and skills of their architecture, and they have built in help sections.  Once you go and start to create your own site you will not as convenient and quick access to help and support to resolve any problems you might have.

Mission Statment

This blog intends to walk you though the steps of building a good site from start to finish.  To often "guides" assume a high level of technical knowledge and usually will force you to seek additional help on their subsections with out explicitly providing direction.  The other direction that guides go is web site building for dummies, I'm not necessarily referring to the line of dummies books but to the massive stack of titles that say something along the lines of "Build your First Website".  If that sounds like a title for a children's book than you won't be disappointed with the level of these guides.  There are also many companies out there that purport to make website building easy by providing you with some simplified tools common templates etc, while this might not sound bad to someone just starting out I highly recommend avoiding these sites, some will try to charge you money but all come with a single major issue and that is with the root domain name.  They will always force you to use an address structured like "theirname.com/yoursitesname" or the other way around.  This is bad, if you are building a business website this is extremely bad, for starters it will immediately make you look less professional, and secondly you will unlikely ever have good search results.  By making you use their domain name as your root name these companies are actually benefiting themselves with any of the content you might create.  Yes this blog will suffer from these issues as well i.e. the address for it is webbuildingblocks.blogspot.com.  Note the ending i.e. blogspot.com comparatively this is relativelybegnign compared to those that use their address first.

 The goal of this Blog is to show the different web site developmental aspects and what is available to someone just starting or someone who has some experience and is looking to take the next step.  To do this a site will be developed along side of this blog, with the posts directly drawing from the steps that have been taken on the site construction.  This blog is not interned for high level technical users although as the build progresses some advanced subjects will be discussed but the aim is to present topics and subjects in easily understandable terms.  The site that will be built in conjunction with these posts will be built as cheaply as possible and as such I will not be using web development and content management software priced at heart attack prices such as Adobe's creative suites.  Many of the program that I will be using will be new to me as well so I am also approaching this as a way to examine the programs used.  In a way I am writing this to organize my own thoughts as much as guide for others.  I am not currently planning on getting into css+ or HTML5 coding as this makes my eyes glaze over, my focus will be on the basics.