Good Webpage Editors for Newbies

Syphyre

My wife is interested in taking over a spot on our local neighborhood association, however part of the job involved editing the webpage for the association.

She is not a computer programmer, and so I am wondering what the currently most useful tools for webpage editing are. As far as I can tell the webpage is fairly standard. (It's not a wordpress site or anything.)

mrcheesypants

Assuming they don't have a CMS, a text editor like Notepad++ should do the trick. She will probably have to learn some basic HTML and maybe CSS, but to just keep a website updated, that's not much harder than learning forum markup.

Figgy

Notepad is fine if "updating website" means just changing text here and there or fixing/adding links, but anything more than that and you'll need to learn HTML and/or CSS.

Syphyre

Doing it by editing HTML or CSS is what I would do if I ever tried working with a webpage (last time I messed with that was 10 years ago.) I was just wondering if there were some WYSIWYG type editor or something. (Well, a free one.)

Vater5B

I've never used it, but I believe KompoZer was developed exclusively for this purpose:

www.kompozer.net

Figgy

Syphyre wrote: »

Doing it by editing HTML or CSS is what I would do if I ever tried working with a webpage (last time I messed with that was 10 years ago.) I was just wondering if there were some WYSIWYG type editor or something. (Well, a free one.)

The problem you're going to run into is when something like a header link has to be changed. You'll have to change that on every single page, rather than just changing a template file. If I was in the same situation my first step would be to migrate the entire webpage over to a proper CMS. Even if you do know what you're doing, it's so much easier and faster.

Bowen

Figgy wrote: »

Syphyre wrote: »

Doing it by editing HTML or CSS is what I would do if I ever tried working with a webpage (last time I messed with that was 10 years ago.) I was just wondering if there were some WYSIWYG type editor or something. (Well, a free one.)

The problem you're going to run into is when something like a header link has to be changed. You'll have to change that on every single page, rather than just changing a template file. If I was in the same situation my first step would be to migrate the entire webpage over to a proper CMS. Even if you do know what you're doing, it's so much easier and faster.

Real men write their own, when they know what they're doing!

But yeah, notepad will be fine. WYISWYG Editors are notoriously bad.

zerzhul

Notepad++ is stellar, I will echo it for good measure.

Bowen

http://notepad-plus-plus.org/

and

http://www.sublimetext.com/

Darkewolfe

bowen wrote: »

Figgy wrote: »

Syphyre wrote: »

Doing it by editing HTML or CSS is what I would do if I ever tried working with a webpage (last time I messed with that was 10 years ago.) I was just wondering if there were some WYSIWYG type editor or something. (Well, a free one.)

The problem you're going to run into is when something like a header link has to be changed. You'll have to change that on every single page, rather than just changing a template file. If I was in the same situation my first step would be to migrate the entire webpage over to a proper CMS. Even if you do know what you're doing, it's so much easier and faster.

Real men write their own, when they know what they're doing!

But yeah, notepad will be fine. WYISWYG Editors are notoriously bad.

This isn't about WYSIWYG editing. Figgy is so, so right. If you're doing any sort of regular updates on a large website, you want a CMS in place so badly. Need something changed in a footer? So much better to make a change to that resource item, rather than having to manually change every single page.

Aumni

Also echoing Notepad++

Syphyre

Ok this is pretty much what I needed to know. My wife will have to learn some basic html or css to take over the maintenance of a website.

Thanks y'all.