[OT] Designing a Website

[Aryan Ameri <a.ameri@linuxiran.org>]

Hi there:

I am a freshman student, in Computer Studies. A project has recently been 
assigned to us in one of our courses (intro to computers), and as I don't 
have experience building websites, I am seeking your advice in this regard.
 
The project is to design and make a personal website. We aren't given any 
outline on the design, we don't have any limitation on what we can put in the 
website, and we don't have storage limitation either. By giving us all these 
freedoms, our professor wants us to be innovative and to make original and 
creative web sites.

This professor, has got his PhD in the telecommunication field, and is a 
communication expert. He has worked with Sun workstation and servers, and I 
bet his Unix knowledge is far greater than mine. Still, he (like everyone 
else) is heavily windows dependent, he uses windows on his laptop and desktop 
(again like everyone else here), and is the kind of guy which certainly don't 
care about standards. for example he thinks very high of macromedia flash. 
Windows is the standard, right?

So, he really cares about a website's design, and insists that a site should 
be as graphic intensive as possible, and should have as much video audio, and 
animation in it as possible. ( I should show him RMS's website once :-)

Anyway, so here I am, and I should design a webpage that will please this 
guy. I unfortunately don't have the time, nor do I have the ability to start 
teaching him "why standards matter". So if my page sucks (graphically), but 
it uses valid HTML tags, and W3C validator thinks it's perfect, still; 
the guy won't pay a damn sh**, and will give me a low grade.

In a nutshell, I want to design a website, that is pleasent to eyes, the 
webpage should be dynamic, and at the same time, I don't want to use non-free 
software in developing my site, and I don't want it to be non-standard.

Is there such a souloution? I know some basic html, but I haven't really 
designed a  website yet. Where shall I begin? What shall I use? Is it 
possible to design a *nice* and a *standard* webpage? I don't want to start 
coding html in Emacs. I have heard that there are some free tools available, 
for the purpose of building websites. But I don't have a clue about any of 
them.

Any advice or URL, or howto that you can point me to, is greatly appreciated. 

Cheers
-- 


/* Those who do not understand Unix 
 *are condemned to reinvent it, poorly */
                                         -UNDEAD Evil GNU/Linux
Aryan Ameri