How to make a website (no HTML skill required)

A quick guide on how to get your website without writing any HTML whatsoever.

Step 1) Choose your site

Find a website that you wish to copy at Open Source Web Design . These website are free for you to use. (The "premium ones" aren't ). For the purpose of this example, I am choosing the one called Oriel

Step 2) Download your site

You need to login to minds, to do this read here Make sure you are in your web directory (so run the command "cd ~/public_html/" ) The ~ is a shortcut for your homedirectory, it is equivalent to /home/minds/USERNAME

Then you need to get copy the text from the download link, in Firefox right click and choose copy Link. In Internet Explorer I am not sure if that option is there , worst case scenario Choose View Source, and copy the link from there. Or just hover the mouse over it and read it off the status bar. In my case the link is.....
http://www.oswd.org/download.phtml/oriel.zip?id=1718

so on my minds terminal I tell it to download that site using this command...
wget http://www.oswd.org/download.phtml/oriel.zip?id=1718
That will download the zip file containing the website. (Right click is Paste in Putty)

Step 3) Unzip the site

For me , the file I downloaded is called oriel.zip?id=1718 so I run unzip oriel.zip?id=1718, to do this, type unzip then the first few letters of the file name and then press tab. Tab will complete filenames and commands for you, this is handy to know.

Step 4) Re-arrange the files.

Basically, the site puts itself in a seperate directory, the following commands will , in order, move the site into your normal webspace , remove the directory that was created, and remove the zip file you downloaded. First , find the name of the directory, (its the same as the design name, in this case oriel ). To see what its called press ls to list files , and look for it. Then run... ( replacing oriel with your site name. ) MINDS> ls
oriel/ oriel.zip?id=1718
MINDS> mv oriel/* .
MINDS> rm -rf oriel
MINDS> rm oriel.zip\?id\=1718
MINDS> ls
index.html oriel.css

The site should now be viewable at http://www.minds.may.ie/~YourUserName , e.g. http://www.minds.may.ie/~dez/

Step 5) Make it your site

All you need to do now is edit the content to put in your details. To do this, run nano index.html ( nano is a text editor ) , and replace all the filler text with info about yourself.

If you haven't used nano before have a look at http://www.minds.may.ie/help/terminal/nano

My example can be seen at http://www.minds.may.ie/~dez/test/

If there are any problems with this, please contact us and explain your difficulties, thanks.