Web Design Software

[Wiltshiresaint]

I'm about to start a fresh real-time CT adventure. It'll be a solo effort, charting the course of my merchant adventurer captain and his free trader.

Part of the fun for me is keeping a nice journal of the adventure. I've decided to set up a website for this one, and I'm wondering what website design software is best to choose for this job.

I'm pretty confident with the normal MS Office programs but have no real knowledge of much beyond that. I'm willing to learn something new, but ideally it needs to be pretty simple to use. I can run the software on my Apple Macbook using Leopard as the operating system, or alternatively I have a partitioned drive so I could run it on Windows (XP).

I'm thinking the choice is either Dreamweaver or MS Expression. I'd prefer to stay with something mainstream if possible as the online tutorials are much more readily available.

Does anyone have some advice they can share?

Many thanks!

 

[lucasdigital]

Greetings Wiltshiresaint,

It's great that you're ready to tackle some web design stuff. For someone looking to dabble, you can always save your word docs in html format. That makes for truly ugly code, but for just starting out, it's forgivable.

You might like to give NVU ( http://www.net2.com/nvu/ ) a try. It's completely free and offers the same kind of interface that the professionals use (we use Dreamweaver at work).

Have you thought about running your site on one of the available blog services? I've a free Livejournal account for my stream-of-thought nonsense. If your Web hosting service/ISP provides you with CGI (website capable of supporting executable web programs), you could install your own blog software. I use Wordpress for my Traveller blog - ( http//www.distantplaces.info ) Again, Wordpress is absolutely free, and pretty easy to set up.

Hope these tips are some help. Good luck!

 

[the angle]

Since this is a hobby thing, my advice is to forget website design programs. Spend an afternoon learning basic HTML from one of many web tutorials. Then create your pages in Notepad (or Notepad++ if you want some extra features). You will a) get a lot more understanding of the process; b) get a lot more satisfaction out of the process; c) learn something useful; and d) produce a site that is streamlined, slick, fast-loading, simple, and entirely yours.

But then, I'm an old-school purist about these things, and I enjoy the process as much as the end product. YMMV. Even if you decide ultimately to use a page-creation tool, knowing the fundamentals of what makes a web page work is useful.

Steve

 

[Beech]

Sounds like you are Mac based, so an easy to learn initial option is iWeb (part of Apple's iLife suite), though this is limited to templates which you can only partially customise (and is not particularly fast loading).

Slightly more advanced and with a few more bells and whistles ,though still limited to templates is Sandvox (cheap) which I use for my site. There is also the similar Rapidweaver. These are both still extremely easy to use and I would recommend going down this route myself.

Any more advanced and you are getting into the professional level of GoLive and Dreamweaver, I have had a go at both of these. You can do a lot more eventually but there is far more of a learning curve and an awful lot more hours to be put in, (and also can be prohibitively expensive).

 

[aramis]

nVu is available for mac. I use it. (I then go back and tweak down the code for faster loading...)

 

[Wiltshiresaint]

Thanks for the replies so far, all very useful and interesting.

I'm experimenting with Sandvox right now. It doesn't give me everything I want in terms of templates but it seems to be close and is certainly very user friendly. I'm also going to take a look at NVU. What I won't do now, at least in the short term, is splash out on any expensive software - looks like it's better to feel my way into this.

Once I've made a final decision I'll post here again with a link to my site.

Thanks again everyone.

 

[Icosahedron]

Most people put their weblinks in their signature, then it doesn't get lost in an old post.

 

[Beech]

And thanks for the heads up on nVu, lucasdigital and aramis.
I am having a go with that myself

 

[Wiltshiresaint]

Most people put their weblinks in their signature, then it doesn't get lost in an old post.

Very good point - I'll do that, thanks!