Open Source Web Design

They cannot teach you what is needed in your site as only you know that. Is it a commercial site? A fan site for a movie star? A blog? Your photography collection? A forum? Porn? How the hell are we or they supposed to know that? Plus, you might want to do some reading on HTML and XML. Even for drag and drop interfaces, it pays to know some of this as it can help you (a) understand what's really entailed and (b) learn how to do more unique work or add more details. E. g. a drag and drop interface might not give you the ability to, say, use superscript. If you know HTML, you know that it codes like this -

Furthermore, as with every site on the planet, you have to be hosted somewhere (that's GoDaddy and its competitors). Want a free site where the hosting is already paid for? Then you're looking for something where the site is heavily templated and rigidly governed (think WordPress itself - not their templates, but their sites). For sites like that, very little design variance is allowed, and even the superscript example I gave above might be taboo. This is because, for free sites, they do not want to be hosting anything they don't have a lot of control over. They want to make sure that their ads are delivered on your site. They (usually) want to have a bit of content control (at least to keep you from putting up an NSFW site). They have rigid size limits as they've got to host lots of people, and that all costs $$. And they want to make sure you're not delivering viruses or are so big and slow that you crash their server.

Hence your first questions should be - what kind of site do you want? What do you want for it to do? How much are you willing to pay to get that done and keep it running? Do you need some education - and are you willing to get it?

There are a lot of easy to put up sites. And they look it. Decent sites take more work. And excellent sites take some serious finesse and education.

Thanks for the reply.
I'm willing to learn some HTML, I understand that side of creating the webpage is needed.
What confused me was when I downloaded/saved the webpage I liked from oswd, the files weren't full of HTML text to change. They have only a few lines of text and are called: images, .DS_Store, global, ie, index and styles.
The oswd website doesn't provide any help for this stage of the process.
Any further help would be appreciated.

I get the feeling that what you thought would be in there just plain isn't in there. And that's the case with a lot of open source. Essentially, when you pay for software and tools, you often get training/a help desk along with them (and you have every right to bitch loudly if those things are inadequate or are absent). But open source often means learning it on your own/everybody else has to go through a steep learning curve.

I just Googled "OSWD forums" and came up with nearly nothing, so you'll need to be more creative and look up things like "do it yourself website" and "open source website" and see where they lead you. I haven't checked either of those searches - they may end up being dead ends as well. For the site where you downloaded the software, is there anywhere to even ask a question? If there is - and they are expecting questions about downloads, but someone still might know - ask about how to get help using the product. At the barest minimum, they should know where something originated. There might be an email address or a domain or the like.

It is digging. And it is a pain. I won't kid you about that. But some open source is better than others. Looks to me like this has very little support. What you might even end up doing it is trashing it and going for something else if you can assure you'll get some decent help with using it.

Sorry I can't be of more assistance.

Open source deals with the universal access of the design or blueprint. It enhance production models or interactive communities.