Website Builder Software

[Rudolf von Hagenwil]

Website Builder Software

 

what is around and easy to use and not expensive, so in the style:

 

Drag & Drop ---> Click & Fix ---> publish online

 

.

[blue2blue]

There are two ways you can go... a web design software that runs on your local machine and uploads the files to your site (or lets you do it yourself via FTP) -- or an online "portal solution managers" like DotNetNuke or PHPNuke. (Depending on what your server's programming options are.)

 

 

I can't weigh in on the latter -- and actually I can't really weigh in on the former -- except to say that WYSIWYG is often a cruel illusion for those who want to avoid coding at all costs.

 

Even powerful and mature applications like Dreamweaver can make an utter mess of code when used strictly in WYSIWYG mode. (And, though it's been a few years since I used it, MS's Front Page was at least as bad.)

 

Part of the problem are the complex, overlapping, conflicting "standards" created by the poorly herded cats of the W3C and the incomplete and inconsistent implementations by the major browsers.

 

(And speaking of MS Front Page, MS has a new, fairly powerful web dev tool called Visual Web Developer [Express is the free pkg] oriented to developing for the .NET 2 platform with its prefab web components -- but it is definitely not for those who don't want to get their feet wet. Still, if someone was committed to .NET, it's the main game in town [DW support for .net 1.1 is limited and nonexistent at this time for .Net2]. And for those coming fresh to it -- or coming from a background in desktop application development -- the paradigm shift might not be so unsettling.)

 

 

[For what it's worth, I use mostly use Dreamweaver 8 for my work (the latest but soon to be supplanted, I believe, in Adobe's quest to suck $400 upgrade fees out of our pockets for the DW/Flash pkg) -- but you have to watch it like a hawk in WYSIWYG mode -- it's absolutely clueless about keeping various tags and styles sorted out. You HAVE to go into the code all the time to un-screw it. DW simply trips over its own feet at every turn -- ESPECIALLY if you try to move toward greater reliance on CSS, as we are heavily encouraged to do. DW gets ALL bollixed up with style sheets. It's a SERIOUS mess.

 

Lately I've been using MS's Visual Web Developer Express... which is also a mixed bag. It's free. That's pretty cool. And much of it is pretty good for dealing with the serverside paradigm of .Net 2 -- but it is not necessarily easy to intuit -- in fact it's sometimes nearly inscrutable -- and some of it is simply NOT FINISHED or wildly inconsistent with what was clearly SUPPOSED to be the design precept. Still, if one's goal is to do .NET 2 dev (and yours, Angelo, should NOT be... it's way overkill I'm thinking for you) it's more or less the only game in town.]

[Cry Logic]

I recently discovered NVU.

 

It's free, open source and really quite good.....

 

 

http://www.nvu.com/index.php

[Rudolf von Hagenwil]

 

Originally posted by fretwizz I recently discovered NVU. It's free, open source and really quite good..... http://www.nvu.com/index.php

 

 

 

Any limitations you discovered with NVU making a website?

 

I downloaded Blue Voda, also free

http://www.bluevoda.com/

 

.

[blue2blue]

NVU looks interesting.

 

Price is certainly right. I like that, right there. I would not recommend someone spending the dough on the increasingly overpriced Dreamweaver (or worse yet the even more overpriced "Studio" ensemble that includes Flash and the photo-prep tool Fireworks) just to do a few web pages.

 

It does look a bit limited -- but that might actually save a little sanity. With so many ways to do any given thing in the overall web model, a little limitation might be just the thing for someone who doesn't want to spend the rest of their life deciding between frontside javascript and backend PHP or ASP, HTML tags versus CSS stylesheets, etc.

 

 

I notice it's built around the Mozilla Gecko engine...

 

I have to give TOP PROPS to the FTP client FireFTP, which, similarly, is a Firefox add-in.

 

While it's strictly an FTP client and won't help you actually build pages, it is a great tool for FTP transfer and the price is of so very fight -- it's free. I used to use WS-FTP but FireFTP hasn't given me a single reason to look back.

[daklander]

I also give a thumbs up to NVU (based on mozilla) and use it to build sites as well as modify existing pages on the sites.

Another free on is Alley Code . It's focus is on php and css. I'm just in the beginning of working with it so can't say too much about it yet. NOT wysiwyg.

There are a couple of decent WYSIWYG free programs out there. Very limited but funtional for a small, limited page, site.

Netscape/Mozilla Composer, Amaya, Trellian, Web Weaver are a few that do a reasonable job of drag and drop. You might be able to find an older D&D called Trellix. It was quite easy to use but the layout was proprietary in some ways and difficult to edit in another html editor.

There is also a Web Developer extension for Firefox.

 

The best free ftp client I've found is Core ftp Lite. I'll have to look at FireFTP.

[Jotown]

PLONE is another free open source solution that several of my web buddies are using.

[Ernest Buckley]

Are you on an Apple?

 

I just started using iWeb from iLife `06. Its pretty simple but there are certain things I want to do with it that are no obvious.

[Rabid]

A few years ago I tried a bunch of packages. Microsoft Front Page drove me crazy with the hoops I had to jump through to upload my work, and trying to break out of the templates. I eventually settled on Dreamweaver for WYSWYG and Hotmetal Pro for editing at the code level. Now I am about to update the company web site and just bought the latest update for Dreamweave. I hope it has improved the code editing features because I'm not sure Hotmetal Pro is in production any more.

[blue2blue]

Yeah, code editing in DW 8 has gotten better... they put some buttons for code/design/and split views that make navigating back and forth a bit easier...

 

They've improved code hinting... somewhat. It ain't Visual Studio but it's better than notepad. The code coloring is helpful, as well. (You may have to turn these on yourself; can't remember how it ships.)

 

It's still really bad -- I have the sense that it's worse but it's probably just what I've been doing lately -- at sorting out junked up code, superfluous tags and stuff. Mixing CSS and format tags can get horrorific fast in WYSIWYG mode...

 

 

One thing that is MUCH worse than DW 4 (the version before last) is load size/time... it's got to take at least FOUR times as long to load as that previous version.

[songrytr]

Photoshop + TextEdit + a few different browsers.

 

If it works on everything you're doing it right.

 

"Building websites that work - since 1995"

[Billster]

Originally posted by Ernest Buckley Are you on an Apple?

 

I used a combination of Freeway Express and a free text editor called TacoHTML.

 

I agree that the WYSIWYG programs can make some bizarre coding decisions. I know enough HTML to be dangerous and used the text editor to clean it up some.

 

You can write HTML code in a plain text editor (or even a word processor), the advantage of an HTML editor is that it recognizes your code tags, and color codes the text between certain tag i.d.'s so that you can quickly scan a long list of code to find particular types of HTML items by color (without going cross eyed)

[blue2blue]

Originally posted by songrytr Photoshop + TextEdit + a few different browsers. If it works on everything you're doing it right. "Building websites that work - since 1995"

 

If it works on everything you're probably using code from 1995.

 

 

[Rudolf von Hagenwil]

If I make a website with Dreamweaver 8.0 ---> isn't that all easy as pie?

 

Do I really have to know all that hand made coding? ---> I think no

 

.

[daklander]

 

Originally posted by Angelo Clematide If I make a website with Dreamweaver 8.0 ---> isn't that all easy as pie? Do I really have to know all that hand made coding? ---> I think no .

 

 

I think yes, unless you want to build a very simple, basic html website. If you want to do that use one of the free programs.

 

Coffee Cup Free HTML Editor

 

Web Page

are a couple of them. There are others that are even simpler, just type the information into fields, load pictures where asked and they will build the basic site. Coffee Cup had one a couple years ago, not the same as the one above.

[Rudolf von Hagenwil]

 

Originally posted by daklander I think yes, unless you want to build a very simple, basic html website. If you want to do that use one of the free programs.

 

 

Well then, I will prepare all the graphics, flash videos and what ever is in the concept, and then I will see if I can get that all into a website with Dreamweaver. If not, i can forward the graphic and video material to a experiences website maker.

 

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[blue2blue]

[Angelo -- if you already HAVE Dreamweaver, for sure, go ahead and fool around. My comments below are more from the point of view that if you don't, you'd have to go out and spend something like $350 US (or more, I have no idea what the cost in Switzerland would be). From that point of view, I'd much rather see you get started with something free or cheap.]

 

Yeah... DW is expensive and complicated -- and, if you know what you're doing and don't mind getting into the code -- because it IS going to mess it up -- DW can be powerful. But if you try to do it all WYSIWYG in DW, you're asking for trouble.

 

DW gets the code all bollixed up -- for sure. It is very bad at sorting out CSS from html tags and usually makes a MESS of any attempts to format or reformat pages unless you are very careful -- and willing to go into the code view and undo the nonsense that will cetainly occur using it in WYSIWYG mode.

 

This should NOT be considered a slag, necessarily, on DW. A very, very real aspect of the problem are conflicting, confusing, poorly implemented standards from the W3C, bless their pointed little committee heads. The world of web design has gotten more and more complex and hard to manage with everyday as more "standards" are shoved in sideways at every turn, older "standards" are deprecated -- and terminologies and nomenclatures are adopted and discarded willy nilly. Throw in the fact that the two major browsers are made by Microsoft on the one hand and a large, cultish, not-always-so-open "open source" community (Mozilla) on the other and you've got a prescription for hair-pulling confusion.

 

 

One of my friends has been using Front Page and now Dreamweaver for some time. He's got a good eye for design (he's a former suit AND a wacky bohemian painter) but he's none too good with code. (Still, I've found more than a couple pieces of MY code folded into his stuff, which is okay with me, but it's kind of funny, anyhow. But he's not afraid to get into the code at least a little.)

 

But, as he tells it, he uses a "stem" style developement pattern, saving versions as he goes along so that when -- not if, when -- his WYSIWYG mode editor makes an uncorrectable mess of the code he drops back a few versions and tries a different tack or tries to check the code after every WYSIWYG change, trying to catch the place where it all goes south.

 

 

Really... you might THINK you can use DW strictly in WYSIWYG mode -- judging from the marketing from Adobe, perhaps -- but in reality, if you make enough changes from the WYSIWYG interface, eventually, you will end up with a page that is HUGELY bollixed up and which will appear to simply REFUSE to do what you tell it to do.

 

Inevitable.

 

 

[PS... I go back with DW to version 2. Before it was DW, I used an early beta of it. I'm thinking that was pushing ten years ago. I've also used Frontpage and am now using Visual Web Devloper as well as DW. And, yeah, for a while I just used Notepad. But I get tired of writing table tags, just like any other sane person, so I always come back to something with a WYSIWYG AND a code view mode...]

[Jeff da Weasel]

I learned that one of the most important things I could do was to go into a page created with a WYSIWYG interface (DW, Go Live, whatever), then start chopping out all the superfluous crap that it inevitably leaves there. And it leaves a LOT! I chop and chop until I get to the point where I start losing content and/or functionality, and then I feel better about my code being leaner and meaner.

 

- Jeff

[blue2blue]

The thing I find happening if I stay too long in WYSIWYG mode is that it lays out so many overlapping, conflicting style spans and divs that you get to a point where NOTHING you try can give you the results you're looking for.

 

Then you sheepishly click on the code view button and realize you REALLY should have been paying attention because your code is a maze of divs and spans and classes and psuedo-classes.

 

 

In fact, I've been doing a bunch of "live mockups" on my own page (I thought my business page should probably not describe me as a "failed poet" and "failed filmmaker" or as a "slacker multimedia producer" anymore if I was going to start soliciting new clients) -- and so I've been changing back and forth, getting ideas, throwing out ideas -- all live, of course, something I would never (almost never) do on a client's site...

 

And I've decided that, once I've settled on an overall look and a basic page format that I will be doing the whole site in as strict an XHTML form as possible -- that means an absolute minimum of straight HTML formatting tags (which in a perfect world would be none) and maximum reliance on a very disciplined CSS approach.

 

I did a client's site like that and it really takes some rethinking -- and a lot of discipline -- but it does make for a very fast loading, clean coded site, by and large. And, when done right, it means you can go a long way to style makeovers just by modifying a central style sheet.

 

But there is ALWAYS that temptation to just, you know, go in and change a font face/size on a page or make some other minor inline html format change -- and then you're back on the slippery slope...