Website Design Program

[RVFmal]

I want to design my own personal website, but am a complete novice at HTML. I know there are a number of sites that apparently offer "free" web builder tools, but ALL of them have some monthly cost involved. I.E to use our tool it's free, but you have to pay us dubious sums of money to host it and then there's this fee and that fee........

Can anybody reccomend a decent EASY to use website building program (preferably a WYSIWIG type) without me having to go and study a language that I will never use again!! Can be online, but preferably offline.

I already have some one who will host it for me, but I want to design it myself.

Any help will be appreciated.

[mairving]

Some of the more popular are Frontpage by Microsoft, Dreamweaver by Macromedia and CoffeeCup.

Frontpage is probably the easiest to use but writes some boring crummy bloated code. Dreamweaver is much better and preferred by designers but is very pricey. Coffeecup is cheap but can write bulky code. Plenty of other editors around like Composer in Netscape. HTML is not all that difficult to master. If you want to learn HTML, then head over to HTML Goodies and learn it.

[kram 2.0]

Well, the best application for building a website with WYSIWYG is Dreamweaver but it's a little on the complicated side and requires a bit of knowledge on HTML to fully utilize the stuff on there - but it's very powerful. I would try the eval on there, and see how it goes. I warn you that it is rather expensive and I would only get it if you really like using it.

Other than that, I just use TextPad and write my own HTML. But a very novice program would be Mozilla's Composer - I never actually used it myself, but I hear it's very good and very usable.


Hope that helps,
kram

[RVFmal]

Thanks. Will try them and advise.

Regards

[Spartan]

I tried Coffee Cup and it was ok. I ended up buying Web Easy Pro 5. I am in the same boat as you.....I don't know any programming languages and don't have the time/will to learn them right now. So far I really like Web Easy. it is WYSIWYG and is fairly intuitive. When I first installed it I just jumped in and started playing around before I read the manuel. I have had a couple problems but they were related to my limited knowledge of FTP software.

A piece of advice would be to create a 2-3 page test site first with all of the types of stuff you want on your final page. Add cross links and everything. Then upload it and see if it all works right. I learned alot this way (like the fact that for my host I should have named the first page index.html).

-Spartan

[glc]

For a freebie total WYSIWYG, it's hard to beat Mozilla Composer.

[mrdeeye]

ive heard all this stuff about frontpage makin bloated code....what exactly does it do that would make it bloated?

[kram 2.0]

Well, I've been working with Dreamweaver and MS Frontpage XP for some time now (2+ years, at least), and MS Frontpage, IMO, doesn't make very standard code, but it isn't very bloated. You just need to find a server that supports MS Frontpage (they will specifically say that) that will let you directly FTP (transfer files) onto the server using the Frontpage program. I learned my HTML playing side by side with MS Frontpage and an HTML book, and I think it's pretty standard to me

As for whether you wanna try it or not, I'd recommend for novices, sure. After looking through several programs, I like Mozilla's Composer the best for being free, and Macromedia's Dreamweaver overall - but the liscencing costs a good deal of money.


Hope that helps,
kram

[mairving]

Originally posted by mrdeeye ive heard all this stuff about frontpage makin bloated code....what exactly does it do that would make it bloated?

Basically it just adds unneeded tags. It also uses older deprecated often MS IE only tags, like <font> and bordercolor. It also doesn't support newer standards all that well like stylesheets (CSS). Basically instead of having 2 lines of code, FP may have 4 or 6. This is not too uncommon among WYSIWYG HTML editors and there are some that produce worse code like Adobe's GoLive.

Probably the thing that I hate about FP is that most every page generated by FP looks somewhat similar.

[mrdeeye]

totally off topic but mairving your sig made me laugh.....i dont understand binary but i take it 10 means 2?

[mairving]

Originally posted by mrdeeye totally off topic but mairving your sig made me laugh.....i dont understand binary but i take it 10 means 2?

Yeah, the funny thing is that most people don't get it.

[Designer]

Dreamweaver isn't that bad for doing web pages, i'm told you can do them with Macromedia flash MX as well but I havn't tried yet. Dreamweaver appears hard to use at first but get yourself a good book like "Dreamweaver MX 2004 accelerated" By YoungJin and you get a CD with it with part done projects so you can walk through with the book.

BTW like the Binary sig mairving, looked at it for a minute before remembering binary reads from right to left.

[Parangles]

Hi Mairving,
check your PMs. Thanks,
Chris.

[toomyg]

What about Yahoo's site builder? I played around with it, it seems OK

[WhatsThisBoxFor?]

I don't like to use online programs, I feel you don't have control. Frontpage is just horrible, and doesn't like ASP that much in my experience (I have had it change my code.)

We have dreamweaver at school, and I used to have a free trial, (ran out) and it is brilliant and the best to use IMO.

[toomyg]

the one I got runs off line
it's like a 15 or 16 mb program