Members Ernest Buckley Posted July 18, 2012 Members Share Posted July 18, 2012 Hey Gang, I used Apples iWeb for the last 6 years but Apple no longer supports iWeb so I`m back to square one with my website. I had a developer initially but grew frustrated with the amount of time it took him to put things up so I took matters into my own hands when I saw how easy iWeb made everything. Right now I`m fooling around with a trial of Freeway Pro by Softpress but its more work than I`m willing to put in. I literally want to put up a 4-5 page site with links to purchase my music. I need something simple. I mean, its got to be easy.... Super easy. Something where I can literally drag photos and type in text and press publish. Are you using or know of any web design program that meets this criteria? Thanks,EB Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members TimOBrien Posted July 18, 2012 Members Share Posted July 18, 2012 KompoZer Free and WYSIWYG. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members peanutroad Posted July 18, 2012 Members Share Posted July 18, 2012 One of the simplest solutions is to use Word Press. Free and easy to use but, of course, it looks like a Word Press site. If you want a drag-and-drop program that's oriented toward designers rather than programmers, Coffee Cup's Visual Site Designer is pretty decent and inexpensive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members scarecrowbob Posted July 18, 2012 Members Share Posted July 18, 2012 If you are a bit computer literate, you might give wordpress a go-- it's pretty easy to use and quite solid as far as the software goes. Most shared hosting (godaddy, hostgator, etc) have it available as a "one click install", though I've never actually used that since I know how to install it myself. There are a wealth of themes out there for it, as well as people who can set it up for you if you get stuck. It is a little more "custom" than some of the other solutions, but it's easy enough that you could at least look at it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CMS Author MikeRivers Posted July 18, 2012 CMS Author Share Posted July 18, 2012 Mine is WordPress and it does everything I need. I'm not smarter or creative enough to use anything more complicated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Ernest Buckley Posted July 18, 2012 Author Members Share Posted July 18, 2012 KompoZerFree and WYSIWYG. Thanks Tim, This looks pretty cool. Been playing around with it the last few minutes. Its self explanatory and could solve the issue. Thanks again,EB Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted July 18, 2012 Members Share Posted July 18, 2012 One of the simplest solutions is to use Word Press. Free and easy to use but, of course, it looks like a Word Press site. If you want a drag-and-drop program that's oriented toward designers rather than programmers, Coffee Cup's Visual Site Designer is pretty decent and inexpensive.Wordpress CMS-derived sites don't have to look one way or another. There are a wide variety of prefab themes covering all sorts of site purposes and features. Some of them are fairly easy to customize in significant ways. A simple setup is easy. But if that's not enough, you can find a number of qualified developers (ahem) who can design a custom theme for you and help you design all sorts of capabilities and features into your site. The great thing about WordPress is that its enormously extensible -- but when it's set up, even a relatively naive user can maintain it. (And, for that matter, a basic site is often trivially easy to set up using typical 'one-click installs' made available on many hosts. Find a theme that allows you to change the background color and header image and you've got a good basic site. The extensibility comes not just from themes and customized themes but also -- and this is the treasure trove -- from the huge variety of plugins designed to offer all sorts of capabilities and even customize and/or automate WP's backend operations, from e-commerce to social media. (And using the BuddyPress 'plugin' [more like a way of life], you can even set up a social media type site for enterprises and organizations.) [bTW, while it makes me a tiny bit nervous, the new, basic hosting (they call it "4GH") at GoDaddy has been working exceptionally well for some clients of mine who have a huge image blog that had bogged down servers on their much, much more expensive main site's hosting. Knock on wood. Their old system could go from OK to really slow. So far, though, "4GH" seems to be as good as could be expected for the money. Touch wood.] (There's also free hosting ON WordPress's commercial site, at www.wordpress.com. You can get a domain hooked up to your wordpress.com-hosted site for less than $20 a year. The (much more customizable) open source site for the server-side software is www.wordpress.org; but if your hosting company offers a 'one-click' install, that's the easiest way to do it, as a rule.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Phait Posted July 22, 2012 Members Share Posted July 22, 2012 +100 on Wordpress, I set up all my clients with it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members scarecrowbob Posted July 22, 2012 Members Share Posted July 22, 2012 I've been toying around with creating a site that is more-or-less wordpress information for musicians. This goes back to a project that I liked from the old prorec board: the Roll-Your-Own-Thunderbird DAW. Basically, the idea was that if you'd stick to a certain set of approved and tested bit of hardware, the folks in the forum would help you get your hardware working... this was back when hardware setup was a bit... iff-i-er Anyhow, I wonder if it would be useful to put up a site that laid out how to get rolling with wordpress from the standpoint of a site to promote a band or musician. Basically, there would be a very specific set of plugins and hosting situations, and articles on how to get going with specific problems, such as how to go about calendaring (google calendars plus a plugin is a nice solution), or how to acquire a theme that works and install it. I can setup a wordpress multisite, and could even roll out sites on it to solve those particular problems... The mind boggles. Anyhow, anybody interested in working on that with me? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members deanmass Posted July 22, 2012 Members Share Posted July 22, 2012 Wordpress or squarespace. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members electrochrisso Posted July 22, 2012 Members Share Posted July 22, 2012 You can also get KompoZerPortable and carry your work around with you.Amaya is also another good Free WYSIWYG.Wordpress is Ok if you intend to do all your work online, you can do it offline but much more complicated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Ernest Buckley Posted July 22, 2012 Author Members Share Posted July 22, 2012 I just want to thank you all who have made recommendations so far. I also want to make this clear... I`m having difficulty figuring out Wordpress... even though the site mentions how "easy" it is.... the level of simplicity I`m seeking may not exist... yet. (Well, it did with iWeb...) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members electrochrisso Posted July 22, 2012 Members Share Posted July 22, 2012 Ernest, if you cant find what you want, I might be able to whip up something easy for you to get going. Here is a link to a site I made up for a friend of mine, who knows absolutely nothing about web stuff: http://www.slimcoder.com/pbn/ All he needs to do is write out the monthly reports, with a custom, easy to use editor I made up for him, that converts everything to html, then upload to the server, when he has got the report looking the way he wants. I cant create a full on web publishing app, it will take too long, but I can make up your site as a template, then you can change stuff you need like pictures, links, text etc, for each page. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members UstadKhanAli Posted July 22, 2012 Members Share Posted July 22, 2012 One of the simplest solutions is to use Word Press. Free and easy to use but, of course, it looks like a Word Press site. If you dig around a bit deeper, it's actually much more flexible and doesn't have to look like a blog or WordPress site. I can use WordPress, but don't find it to be quite as easy to use as everyone says it is. I am using Dreamweaver right now, but don't find that easy to use either. Maybe it's because I knew it fairly well, but in many ways, I found FrontPage easy to use. I know web designers will cringe at that, and I fully realize the shortcomings it had and the alterations to code it did, but in terms of ease of use, I felt they nailed that pretty well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members BushmasterM4 Posted July 23, 2012 Members Share Posted July 23, 2012 I found Frontpage easy to use too. If you can use Word, you can use Frontpage. I now use Microsoft Expression (replaced Frontpage), but alas, they are not free. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members UstadKhanAli Posted July 23, 2012 Members Share Posted July 23, 2012 Exactly. It was greatly maligned, partially because it altered some code (although, hell, Dreamweaver does that too and I don't see people moaning nearly as much about that), but it was easy to use. Simple and easy. BTW, few people I know seem to know this, but if you have Word, you can create web pages by simply saving it as an HTML file. While it's not the greatest thing, you can do this in a pinch. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members LiveMusic Posted July 24, 2012 Members Share Posted July 24, 2012 Try www.weebly.com. It is easy. And also indexes well with search engines. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted July 24, 2012 Members Share Posted July 24, 2012 Exactly. It was greatly maligned, partially because it altered some code (although, hell, Dreamweaver does that too and I don't see people moaning nearly as much about that), but it was easy to use. Simple and easy. BTW, few people I know seem to know this, but if you have Word, you can create web pages by simply saving it as an HTML file. While it's not the greatest thing, you can do this in a pinch. In a real pinch. MS Word writes some of the worst, least efficient, hardest to maintain web code I've ever seen -- with the only possibly worse being the old iWeb software that used to come with iLife. (And at least iLife tried to discourage you from even looking at the code it generated, since it used an internal template design system and the translated that into garbage HTML. But if you made changes to the HTML, they'd be lost next time you tried to edit the page in iWeb. But seriously awful code from both.) But iWeb, Word's HTML 'capabilities' and even CMS systems like WP, Drupal, and pseudo-CMS site/services like Blogger/Blogspot,* highlight a central problem in building websites or developing software: it's possible to find tools that promise to do everything or almost everything for you -- but with that all-encompassing 'helpfulness' typically comes systems which, if flexible at all, end up requiring the user to learn the system. At times that becomes a bigger chore than just creating a simple site. (And there's little question that designing a fully custom WP or Drupal theme/skin can be considerably more trouble than designing a simple static site. But once you've got your fully custom theme, you can build on that with extensions/plugins. And many sites don't really require a ground-up custom theme; often a basic/starter theme can be tinkered to satisfaction.) That said, if the platform has a lot of developer support (as WP and Drupal do), you will likely find plugins and extensions that extend the platform in ways that might take a huge investment in time and effort to recreate. I've taken to telling people that a well-designed and extended WP site can offer features that might cost 5 to 10 times as much to develop from scratch. If not lots more. But that said, sometimes one doesn't need the kitchen sink. *I do NOT recommend Blogger/Blogspot, as I started out on Blogger before Google bought them. Google sometimes does things right and sometimes really messes with the pooch... in the case of Blogger they took a clunky, awkward, limited system and made it worse in many ways, although it must certainly be better than it was, as there are still a few people who use it... but it has, overall, dropped to footnote status, by and large. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted July 24, 2012 Members Share Posted July 24, 2012 Try www.weebly.com. It is easy. And also indexes well with search engines. How much does it cost to remove the Weebly branding from one of their template sites? It always makes me nervous when a company seems reluctant to let you know how much something will cost. Weebly hypes the "free" part but don't tell you anywhere in front of the sign up that your site will have their branding in the form of 'Create your own Free Weebly Site' type buttons on your pages. (I had to find that from third party write-ups.) And though there apparently are a number of pay-for services to augment your site, they apparently don't let you look at them unless you're already signed up with them. Me, I find that troubling. Still, this might be just the thing for a lot of folks. Quick question, LiveMusic... are all the features listed on their site available on the free/branded tier? Do you have a public link to feature/rate comparisons between their tiers? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted July 24, 2012 Members Share Posted July 24, 2012 I found Frontpage easy to use too. If you can use Word, you can use Frontpage. I now use Microsoft Expression (replaced Frontpage), but alas, they are not free. I haven't used Expression, but I used earlier versions of Visual Web Developer Express (the Express line is MS's free developer tools -- and in the past they've been really a bargain. http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/visual-web-developer-express Seriously, while they don't have all the features of the enterprise versions -- I found the earlier versions I worked with to be very capable and mostly pretty well designed). That said, they are pretty Windows/ASP oriented. And may have more developer / less 'consumer' orientation than something like Expressions. I've moved steadily away from putting sites on Windows servers -- not because they don't perform well, in my experience, they seem to do quite well, depending on the hosting provider -- but simply because the 3rd party/Open Source development scene is SO much richer for Linux/PHP. For instance, it can be a hassle getting WordPress to run on a typical Windows server and even when you get it going, there may well be a large number of plugins and such that can't be used. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Bookumdano2 Posted July 24, 2012 Members Share Posted July 24, 2012 I bought a program called Coffee Cup a million years ago. Never really used it, but I get free updates for LIFE. It's up to version 12 now. Dunno if that one is considered easy or good by anyone here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Tim Mayock Posted July 24, 2012 Members Share Posted July 24, 2012 I'm a Weebly user after using wordpress; Both have their place. I don't mind the Weebly thing at the bottom. http://www.northfieldmusic.org/ is a weebly site. Bandcamp is what i use for my music page. Weebly pro was another option for putting music on my site, but i went for total free site building. Some would say you get what you pay for. Blue you know this stuff really well and i am a mere duffer! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Ernest Buckley Posted July 24, 2012 Author Members Share Posted July 24, 2012 I bought a program called Coffee Cup a million years ago. Never really used it, but I get free updates for LIFE. It's up to version 12 now. Dunno if that one is considered easy or good by anyone here. Its PC based. I already checked it out. It looked really nice though... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members sventvkg Posted July 24, 2012 Members Share Posted July 24, 2012 Mine are Wordpress: www.seanmormelo.com www.wullbeseeinya.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted July 24, 2012 Members Share Posted July 24, 2012 I'm a Weebly user after using wordpress; Both have their place. I don't mind the Weebly thing at the bottom. http://www.northfieldmusic.org/ is a weebly site. Bandcamp is what i use for my music page. Weebly pro was another option for putting music on my site, but i went for total free site building. Some would say you get what you pay for. Blue you know this stuff really well and i am a mere duffer! Looks good, Tim! Nice and clean. People forget the important thing is the content. And with regard to the branding: for some of my personal blogs I use lightly customized versions of other people's presentation themes and so have their branding on those blogs. For client sites, though, I start with a so-called starter theme (basically the page's element categories wrapped with CSS IDs -- building blocks, if you will -- if you use such a theme, plain, it looks like so much plain text interspersed with pictures or other graphics) and then I create the CSS layer that places and styles those elements into an actual presentation page. Then I use carefully selected plugins and/or use programming hooks to create custom functions to further extend the capabilities of the website. (Blah blah blah.) Anyhow, it's all about jumping off places. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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