I'd suggest FrontPage, but that will doom you to eternal muppet land, and fill your life with templated websites that make use of cheap recycled MS graphics and generally result in little more than the same website everyone else has unless you take the time and put up with the frustration to do a decent job of it. It is however, useful for people (like me) who need a rush job for a school project and have no HTML knowledge. I think Geocities and Homestead used to offer their own fully online web page editor, but that was years and years ago.



Edited by - J Dawg on 12/15/2005 8:48:58 AM

that's sort of the point I was making; I've already rejected Frontpage because I want to build on my first attempts and not be doomed to repeat them forever. But I can hardly launch straight into Dreamweaver, can I?

of course I could cheat and get the plasticine dog to do it, but I'd rather do the work myself. it's a pride thing.

go to www.tripod.com, thiers is free, and has a built in editer, to simlify the set up. You can have a site up and running in minuets.

Depends upon exactly what you want to do Taw, because there are many CMS (Content management systems) out there that do the work for you, giving you ease of mind and comfort. It's what i am using on my site - www.pathfinderstudios.com - a CMS system called Mambo *(although recently changed to Joomla!). All I do it log into to admin panel, and then simply type out what I want. Add a picture, I click on a button and use the WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor, which can be handy. Its a bit like posting on a forum when done that way, you don't have to fiddle with FTP or other such stuff every time, and it's database driven too (so dynamic content).

Alot of them are free, and some may even have Ebay related "plug ins" etc, shopping carts - the works, but it would require some research onto that area before getting hopes up tbh.

I haven't done much research on the things, but what to do really does rely upon what exactly she wants, as some will have addons etc that are more suitable than others. What is she wishing to acheive with the site, advertising products? Need ability to have them arranged a la photo gallery - point and click for information etc...

Course, you can always build your own, I used to do that, but there isn't enough time in the day sometimes

thx boys. I'll have bash with those and then curse you roundly when I mess it up.

If you want to make a site yourself you may need to learn HTML, this is basically what many websites are written in (some sites such as this one use a server side script to generate HTML, but this is alot more complex). There is a site clalled W3 Schools ( http://www.w3schools.com/ ) which as apparently ment to be good for learning HTML, and it uses proper HTML code that is in the standards (proberly because the W3 are the people with the specs ). For a copy of the specs which basically say what you can and cannot do in HTML is availlable from http://www.w3.org .

I have yet to find a good WYSIWYG (drag-and-drop style) editor, I tend to write all my pages by hand in a text editor though I normally use an editor with at a minimuim content highlighter, and some have a content completion option i.e. you strat typing a tag and it suggests completions. I tend to write in the raw HTML instead of using WYSIWYG editors because I need to incorpirate it into a server script and many editors tend to add more HTML then needed and makes hard to read HTML. Of course there are multipule ways to write the same file and they can all be correct but differant its just some are easier to manipulate.

andy101
You said "some sites such as this one use a server side script to generate HTML"

Just to let you know... there is not a script generator for the HTML code...
I do everything myself...by hand, using nothing but notetab.

I think you mis-understood what I ment by server side scipt? maybe I don't say things as clearly as I should. what I mean is ASP is kind of a script, surely this site needs some kind of server side code to go and retrieve all these posts and put them together and display the finished page? I basically mean a server side script is often used to take HTML (which can be hand written and often is because most WYSIWYG editors create poor HTML) and take the stuff that the dynamic content like user contributed posts and combine the 2 using the computer code written by whoever wrote the site. Admittidly my kowledge of ASP is not that good, you can only learn so many languages .

I hope I din't offend you, I certianly didn't mean to, it must hav taken a hell of alot of effort and a lot of skill to produce a site like this, the mount of code needed to get a forum working is alot more than it looks to users.

Nice to see that people still use text editors, it is really the only way to write HTML that needs to be incorporated into programs. I personally tried a few IDEs, currently I code with GEdit on my Linux boot (Dual boot system, windows for normal stuff Linux for development), unfurtunatly I can't get CVS to work properly on windows. Do you use any kind of version control system to help maintain this site?

BP, you had to learn HTML from scratch, how did you find that? obviously I've made zero advances on this so far (but there are genuine reasons for that, i'm not being lazy) Basically, if you could do it, can i do it? how long did it take you to become au fait with HTML?

Hello Taw and sorry for not replying to your post sooner, I didn't notice it until today.
As for learning how to use HTML it's not that hard. Mostly trial and error. And as you know you can always ask Arcon, Finalday, myself or anyone that knows HTML if that's what you plan to use.

I suggest you get a program like notetab lite v4.95 from http://www.fookes.com/
Description ripped from their site.
"The ultimate free Notepad replacement and a handy HTML editor. Handle a heap of files with a tabbed interface. Search files, strip HTML tags and format text quickly. Formerly called "Super NoteTab". 100% freeware -- no ads and no nags."

The nice thing about doing it this way is you can see what you did by saving the file you're working on as an .html file and F8 on the keyboard will bring up the file in your default browser so you can see what it will look like in a browser.

This program by no means teaches you how to use HTML but it makes it a lot easier to add the tags by highlighting the text and then double clicking on the tag you want to use, like paragraph, bold, link, etc..
There is a column of tags on the left side of the program to choose from.

As for learning there are a lot of sites that have free tutorials and examples of how to use HTML or whatever you plan to use. Do a search something like HTML tutorial

If you want any help you know we'll be there for you.