Website builder program

[Judahnator]

A friend of mine's father asked me to build a website for him. He heard that i have experience building and running my own site. So when he asked me to build one for him, i thought it was easy cash.

 

My original thought:

The site i built was 100% written from scratch. I did start with a template, but i didnt use any software. I also hosted it on my own equipment. I have some experience with Square-Space and WordPress for my dads and his business's website. So if all else fails we can use Square-Space or something nice like that.

 

The crushing of my thoughts:

The person im developing for has already payed a local ISP for hosting services (link). Which i believe to be the worst idea ever (check out their price/internet speed, their other services are just as bad). He also wants to be able to work on the website on his own after i am finished through a website building software.

Now, i have very little experience with programming with anything outside of Eclipse and Notepad++. The end user would like to never need to see the code though, if that's possible.

 

Does anyone know of a simple free program i can use to build a few HTML pages?

 

 

Thanks in advance for the help,

 

Judah

[brob]

A friend of mine's father asked me to build a website for him. He heard that i have experience building and running my own site. So when he asked me to build one for him, i thought it was easy cash.

 

My original thought:

The site i built was 100% written from scratch. I did start with a template, but i didnt use any software. I also hosted it on my own equipment. I have some experience with Square-Space and WordPress for my dads and his business's website. So if all else fails we can use Square-Space or something nice like that.

 

The crushing of my thoughts:

The person im developing for has already payed a local ISP for hosting services (link). Which i believe to be the worst idea ever (check out their price/internet speed, their other services are just as bad). He also wants to be able to work on the website on his own after i am finished through a website building software.

Now, i have very little experience with programming with anything outside of Eclipse and Notepad++. The end user would like to never need to see the code though, if that's possible.

 

Does anyone know of a simple free program i can use to build a few HTML pages?

 

 

Thanks in advance for the help,

 

Judah

 

Most hosting services support several CMS (content management system) - Concrete 5, Joomla, Wordpress, etc. Check out what the ISP supports/allows and pick one. Once you've figured out how it works and set up the pages giving your uncle the ability to update stuff is simply a matter of creating a username and password for him with the appropriate authorities and some instruction. These systems are designed to allow for authorized end-user maintenance.

 

Nothing wrong with using a hosting company. In fact it makes very good sense for a business, especially if they pick a reliable hosting company. If things don't work out with this ISP you can always point him in the direction of bigger and cheaper companies. I use hostgator for low volume sites, but there are any number of very good providers out there.

[r3bify]

You can check out KompoZer.

It wasn't my favorite tool when I checked it out, but free is free.

Here are a couple articles with more, sorry in advance if they all have the same software on them.
http://www.hostsearch.com/articles/the-5-best-free-wysiwyg-alternatives-to-dreamweaver.asp
http://www.webdistortion.com/2008/04/12/webdesign-on-a-budget-six-free-alternatives-to-dreamweaver/

[jetbuster]

If I was gonna make a website, the first thing I do is make a good looking mockup in photoshop, keeping in mind that you can easily change colours and the finer points like the length of the shadows effects or the rounding on a box.

Personally none of the wysiwyg editors make sense to me and they'll probably make shoddy work of the website's coding, but I've always been comfortable in structuring my websites from scratch.
If you like one of the editors and also have good html knowledge you could easily clean up the code after you've had the design approved.

 

The one thing I favour is a css sizing framework called unsemantic which Ive used to create a responsive website from a static one with little change to the style.
Theres also the many flavours of 'Twitter bootstrap' which you could use as a starting point if you need to, they all have good documentation and tutorials