web publishing (cheating)

iWeb (part of iLife '06).

If you don't have it on your Mac, it's only about $90 (still probably the cheapest option out there).

I still use an old copy of Netscape Communicator to make very basic pages. It is a WYSIWYG editor and does tables and such but doesn't offer templates or style sheets etc. Best of all, it was free and creates very simple html. I have found iWeb to be difficult for non .Mac sites. Whenever I export or save to a non .Mac service I have to check all the links and rename some items (very long, numeric names) so that things flow properly.

If it's simple sites. Try getting your hands on Netscape 7.0.

Good luck.

Here is a starting point for you to get templates for Netscape Composer:

http://wp.netscape.com/browsers/templates/

Oh, just suck it up and learn HTML - you'll be glad you did! There are lots of good books on the market to get you started. After you learn basic HTML, you'll find that it's very useful to know, even if you graduate to a WYSIWYG program like DreamWeaver or GoLive.

yep

hey right on thanks guys. I'm going to mess around with these and see what I get. I'll post a link to my site once it's looking somewhat decent.

hungryhouse said:

hey right on thanks guys. I'm going to mess around with these and see what I get. I'll post a link to my site once it's looking somewhat decent.

Click to expand...

Before you start, you might want to take a look at this app ( Rapid Weaver) Im surprised no one mentioned it yet, there might even be a trial download on it. and the pricing isnt that bad.

http://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/

Gerbill said:

Oh, just suck it up and learn HTML - you'll be glad you did! There are lots of good books on the market to get you started. After you learn basic HTML, you'll find that it's very useful to know, even if you graduate to a WYSIWYG program like DreamWeaver or GoLive.

Click to expand...

Yep, even back in the late 90s when I was designing pages using *ahem* Frontpage *ahem* Express *ahem, I still used HTML to put in mouseover image changes and white pinstripe lines. Think of it as using Garageband to throw in a quick tune, beat, and demo recording, but using the complicated but powerful Logic Pro to finish it up.

Sitegrinder. Never used it myself. I read you can do the layouts in Photoshop and it'll do the coding. Myself, I took some night courses in Dreamweaver and got my certification. You'll be amazed how much you can absorb in a classroom with your peers.

Taco HTML Edit

• free
• works at HTML level so you learn to code
• quickly view results so is easy to tweak
• did I mention - FREE

Also see HTML Goodies for all sorts of tutorials and code snippets.

Free Mozilla HTML editor

If you're doing simple html, you could also have a look at Mozilla's SeaMonkey Project and the SeaMonkey Composer.
The SeaMonkey® Project

How about NVU? Yes this program is free. It has the basic HTML funtions and more. My websites first page is done with this program. Took me maybe 5 minutes unlike iWeb which took me 20 min to get the links right.

NVU is a very good program for doing basic stuff. If you like templates, I would recommend Apple's own iWeb or Webpage Maker, which I used a lot when I started making websites.
For more advanced users, a CMS (such as Drupal) should do the job: it's free, easy, extremely poweful (PHP) and is highly customizable.
Hope my post will help you!

Another good alternative (if you don't want to learn HTML) I've heard of is Sandvox, it's US$50 and has a free demo. I think that it is very similar to Rapid Weaver.

Sandvox is a lot like Rapidweaver. I prefer Rapidweaver however -- I felt it was much easier to get going in Rapidweaver.