Steps to create a Website using PhP and MySQL?

I usually use GoDaddy because they support PHP and MySQL (among other things).
The steps involved… depend on what you want to do.
Templates… depend on what you want to do.

What’s needed is not relying on pre-assembled templates and learning what goes into it for yourself. A user friendly introduction using O’Reilly’s “Headfirst” series of books. They have a PHP & MySQL book (along with Javascript, AJAX, and others). They’ll be easy to read ‘get-the-basics’ books.

so wat exactly is the books name? O’Reilly’s “Headfirst”??

There’s: “Headfirst PHP & MySQL”, “Headfirst Javascript”, “Headfirst AJAX”, and about a billion other ones. Like I said, they’re pretty good for crash course learning thing.

If I were going to make a suggestion it would be to see if you can find them used or at Half Price Books or, I suppose, even Amazon. Or a library, of course. They are kind of expensive and some people don’t care for their style.

are you familiar with php + mysql or similar?

@ chris – not as much….i am in the learning stage.

then i would grab some online tutorials or mebbe even some of the visual quickstart books. check out the following for starters:

http://www.amazon.com/PHP-Web-Visual-QuickStart-Guide/
http://www.amazon.com/MySQL-Second-Larry-Ullman/
http://www.amazon.com/PHP-MySQL-Dynamic-Sites-ebook/

I avoid templates.

The steps for creating a new site from scratch are to draw a mock-up of what you want as a look and feel in a good graphics program like Photoshop. You definitely want a graphics program that supports multiple layers so you can separate images that will be part of the HTML background from images and text that will be in the foreground.

Once you have the look established, you dice the graphics up to form the needed background and foreground images to give your site its unique look and feel. Then write HTML and CSS to build a sample of each style page the site will have. Generally a site will have a home page, various information pages, perhaps some section pages that show links to a series of information pages about a given topic, a site-map, a site search page, about us page, contact form, etc.

With the HTML frame for the pages, you are ready to start coding PHP. Most sites have a C frame, D frame or I frame layout. In other words, C would consist of a header left navigation column and footer with content displayed to the right of the left nav. The D frame traps content in the center between header and footer and left nav. plus right column. The I frame is for simple sites where a top and bottom navigation horizontally below the header and just above the footer provide all the navigation you need.

PHP will build the basic framework you chose for all the site’s pages, and will populate the content area with what is specific to that page by querying MySQL to grab the correct content and spit it our as HTML.