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Vaughn McMillan

Vaughn McMillan

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What software are you folks using to create and maintain your websites with? I have a love/hate relationship with Frontpage (what I use now for two different sites), but I'm looking to move to a different hosting company, and figure this would be a good time to cut off the Frontpage ball and chain.

I'm relatively computer savvy, and have been working with markup languages since 1991. Still, I don't want to hand-code my sites. I'm looking for an easy-to-use WYSIWYG website creator that provides (or supports) excellent photo gallery options. A nice assortment of style templates would be a big bonus too, since I don't really feel like starting with a blank page. I want the end result to look upscale and professional. It needs to run on WinXP, too. I'd like to keep the cost in a reasonable range...Dreamweaver is a bit over my limits. (Plus, I love/hate Adobe products about the same as MS products, so I try to avoid adding more Adobe stuff into my mix.)

Suggestions?
 
I bought Web Easy 6 Professional, by V-Com, based on reviews I read. I tried it out but never set up my website. (re: Terrco duplicator failure story) It's a kinda Print Shop click 'n place program but works fine and has zillions of optional features. Claims to have built in search engine optimizer. However, a friend who does web building professionally says this is impossible.
 
Vaughn,

I have heard good things about Coffee Cup. Here's their "visual" web designer soft, and they have lots of other specialty soft too, depending on what you want to add. About $50 for this one, but you should check out their whole site.

http://www.coffeecup.com/designer/

I believe FrontPage is history.... just too much "only works when it wants to, and even then, only the way it wants to...
 
Coffee Cup HTML editor. Very reasonable prices and free updates. I haven't upgraded to the later versions but it does have a WYSIWYG editor, has for a while now. I got used to working with the code so I have not upgraded and tried it. So I keep using the earlier version. You may hate it, but I like it. I have a couple of pieces of their software and so far I have been impressed.
 
I've been mucking about with NVU at work and it's pretty decent to work with. Open Source and the price is right (free). My biggest issues are when I have to make it cooperate with pages generated by MS Word, Powerpoint, Excel, etc. though that's more a fault of the way MS does things than a NVU issue.
 
Vaughn McMillan said:
What software are you folks using to create and maintain your websites with?
...
I'm relatively computer savvy, and have been working with markup languages since 1991. Still, I don't want to hand-code my sites.
Click to expand...

vi.

I know, it fails your 'no hand-coding' requirements, but you did ask...

Doug Shepard said:
I've been mucking about with NVU at work and it's pretty decent to work with.
Click to expand...

I thought nvu was abandoned? I didn't find any current updates or current plans listed.


Actually, I was also looking around for something 'easier' to take over my web page a few months ago. I was trying to find something a bit more automated -- ie: if I want to change something that applies to ALL my web pages I don't want to hand-edit umpteen pages.

But I really didn't find much. For the first time I dug into style sheets, and they help a bit, but you still seem to end up with a lot of custom tweaking on each page. Ditto for the various free WYSI-MOL-WYG (what you see is - more or less - what you get ;) ) -- tools out there.

And since my web page was already hand-coded, the conversion pain seemed large.

I ended up with doing just a bit of hand-coding to come up with a minimalist style sheet that does most of what I want, and I put that together with WML which I had already been using.

WML is a macro language. You can get very complicated, or keep it pretty simple. I keep it pretty simple. I have defined less than 10 macros that I use in all my web pages. (ie: instead of using <TABLE> in html, I use a macro I defined called <AM-TABLE>) So I am kind of still using hand-coding, but with the macros and the style page, I have the ability to make a change to just two files, type "make", and have the change show up all over my web pages.

This suits my needs right now. But I do NOT have any shopping-cart type needs, and I do NOT have any big photo-gallery type needs either. I also strictly stuck with free tools.

Probably no help to Vaughn, but maybe to someone else.

best,
...art
 
I used to use FrontPage also but it's no longer supported by MS so I bought Expression Web. It's a bit different from FP but not that difficult to get used to. I only do very simple things, however.

Mike
 
Vaughn,

We take care of around 25,000 webpages. Years ago, I banned frontpage, and we embarked on the content management journey. Eventually, we wrote our own, in coldfusion. Lots of web hosting services support CF, it'll help you hook up to databases for images and prices, etc. It'll take you as far as you want to go, and the ramp up curve is short.

On the other hand, I'm with Art on this one. Former english professors use CF. Real men use vi... ;)

Thanks,

Bill

(who's resisting the old "ED is the standard
!
! text editor"

jokes... ;)
 
I too have a love hate relationship with FrontPage, I love to hate it :D :rofl:

I recently got Dreamweaver, a full version from a friend, he got it with a new computer but he has no interest in making a website, so I got the soft, never opened etc. :D

Seems like one heck of a tool, but man, the learning curve is STEEP, makes Sketch Up looks REAL simple :D

I'm slowly getting on it, but I've not had the time to really dig into it.

Cheers!
 
I'm with Stu on this one. Dreamweaver has a ton of features, but there is a steep learning curve. I haven't done a website in a while, but the last one I did was mostly with Dreamweaver. It took me a lot of playing around with it to get what I was looking for. I'm sure if it was more familar with it it would have gone faster.

The Dreamweaver I used was when it was still made by MacroMedia. I believe that Adobe bought them out..... so this might rule them out for you.
 
Thanks for the input so far, guys.

I poked around the CoffeeCup site a bit but didn't download the trialware yet. I have mixed feelings about the way they have their products separated into a boatload of different modules, but it looks worth checking out. I'll also give Hot Dog Pro a spin, although I can't say I was impressed with their website. I did like what samples I saw of their photo galleries. I did download kompozer, the follow-up to Nvu, an open source semi-knockoff of Dreamweaver. I'll try a few and see which ones seem to fit my way of working.

The price for Dreamweaver is pretty hefty, and although it's the full monty, I really don't want to devote the time necessary to learn it. Every Adobe/Macromedia application I've ever run has been very unintuitive to learn, and a bloated hog on the system to boot.

Thanks again, and keep 'em coming.

And Bill, the correct answer to the text editor question is LSE (Language Sensitive Editor) from Digital Equipment Corporation. :rofl: I used that one a lot when I was spending all day inside SDML (Standard Digital Markup Language).
 
Vaughn McMillan said:
[...]the correct answer to the text editor question is LSE (Language Sensitive Editor) from Digital Equipment Corporation. :rofl: I used that one a lot when I was spending all day inside SDML (Standard Digital Markup Language).
Click to expand...

SDML, eh? I spent several years (1990-1998) writing code around SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). Was SDML an application of SGML (like HTML is ... kinda sorta) or was it perhaps a customized version of the ISO standard itself?

Back on topic: Thanks for asking this question; the answers have been great. But, now I have even more stuff to keep me out of the shop! :doh:
 
"And Bill, the correct answer to the text editor question is LSE (Language Sensitive Editor) from Digital Equipment Corporation."

Vaughn,

A VAX was my first mainframe, at TSU. LSE was the default editor, and I wrote a lot of papers and verse in it. Good joke for you: I once took a job because I read SRUVM as if it were SRUVMS. So I went there thinking I'd be working on a VAX, when it was actually an IBM, and I suffered through RICEmail for a couple years.

When I arrived here, I wasn't really accepted by the computer folks. So I called Duncan (our old VAX guru at TSU). He told me to change my command prompt from $ to November 18, 1858$. After I did that, the geeks (who were always looking over my shoulder), figured I couldn't be all bad... ;)

Thanks,

Bill
 
Lee DeRaud said:
Ok, I'll bite: what is that? Charles Babbage's birthday or some obscure IBM error code?
Click to expand...
It's the starting date of the system clock in a DEC VAX machine. Many time measurements were a delta from that starting time, as I recall. Here's way more info about it than I knew:

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/wizard/wiz_2315.html

Kerry, I believe SDML was DEC's implementation of SGML. What little I looked at SGML, it looked very similar to SDML.
 
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