Most web hosting providers supply at least one tool that is supposed to make creating a web site easier for people just starting out. It is to their advantage to do so since if they don’t provide such tools then the beginners will get their hosting from a competitor who does provide those tools.

There are two types of tools that hosting providers usually supply that are aimed at newbies to the web. The first of these is some sort of “web wizard” which will allow them to create basic web pages and link them all together without having to learn how to write HTML. This sort of facility in fact does make the very first step in creating web pages much easier. The person simply selects one of a small handful of page layouts that the wizard supports and plugs in their content to create pages. The problem comes when they want to take the second step and make some minor modification to the way that their web pages work. These web wizards do not allow much choice in what you can do with them and so this second step change will almost always NOT be able to be done using the wizard. To make their minor change the newbie will need to go back to the beginning, learn HTML and rebuild their web pages properly from scratch.

The second type of facility that web hosts provide for newbies is a one step installer for commonly used scripts. If the web host is using the cPanel control panel then this one step script installer is usually supplied via a third party service from Fantastico.

The problem with these one step installers is that they severely limit the customisation that you can perform when setting up your script and they also limit your ability to upgrade to the latest version (and hence plug the security holes that the latest version plugs) until Fantastico make the upgrade available. Install ten scripts from within Fantastico and you need ten databases to install them in instead of the one database that you could use if you installed them yourself. The Fantastico install also removes many of the install options and hence limits the way you can have the script configured.

When the newbie wants to select a configuration option not allowed for by Fantastico then they have to replace the Fantastico install with a manual install of their own.

In each case as soon as the newbie wants to take the second step, having taken the easiest option at step one has now made step two several dimes as difficult as the two steps together would have been if the person had taken the time to do it properly without using these newbie tools in the first place. Often even the experts will not know what to tell these newbies to do to resolve their problems in taking their second step because the newbie now has a second step confronting them that is more complicated than the expert who learnt things properly from the start has ever had to confront.

In deciding whether to take the ‘easy’ way out and use the web wizard and one step install script tools provided by their web hosting provider or to do things the ‘hard’ way using a web editor on their own computer (I recommend Kompozer or NVU which are free WYSIWYG web editors) and manually installing any server side scripts, the person really needs to consider whether they will ever want to take that second step. If the answer is yes then their best option is to take the slightly harder way for the first step and use a web editor on their own computer and/or manually install scripts and thus avoid the way more complicated second step that the so called easier first step option will produce.

Tags: basic web pages, html, newbie tools, script tools, step installer, step script installer, web editors, web host, web hosting, web wizard, web wizards