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Website design apps
Midshipman
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Does anyone here have experience with web design programs like Frontpage or Dreamweaver? My father is interested in setting up a web page for his hobby of collecting and restoring fountain pens and is wondering whether any of the currently available site design programs are worth using.
He is fairly computer literate, and is open to eventually learning HTML, Javascript, what-have-you, but he's primarily interested in something that will let him get started right away without too steep of a learning curve. I'd welcome any suggestions as to what would be good to get him started.
He is fairly computer literate, and is open to eventually learning HTML, Javascript, what-have-you, but he's primarily interested in something that will let him get started right away without too steep of a learning curve. I'd welcome any suggestions as to what would be good to get him started.
Midshipman on
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I don't have any experience with Frontpage, so I can't comment on that, however.
A buddy of mine does that professionally, AND he's teaching me the ropes. While I know absolutely nothing in the dept, my friend has set up websites for Texas University and a few others.
If you can wait it out a day, I can ask.
look up google's page generator called google pages, lets you drag content around put pictures in and add sections i just ref'd it to another friend a few days ago and did this in about two minutes to show her how easy it is.
dreamweaver is the standard for doing web design, personally i use illustrator and export to dreamweaver for content, but for someone with no design knowledge unless he is willing to invest tons of time teaching himself the ropes and still making a pretty so-so page i'd go with a premade one using google or the many other alternatives out there..
Sure it's not the best WYSIWYG editor, but it's the best free one I've found.
You can read a book like Web Designer's Reference from Friends of Ed in about a week during your lunch break and come out of it with a really solid grounding in how to plan and build sites using CSS and xhtml.
What a lot of people don't realize is you can make an attractive web page without using many graphics at all, just a few divs and CSS. Ultimately such a page is easier to read, and faster to load.
XHTML can be understand in about ten seconds, and CSS is not syntactically difficult so much as it's hard to know what your options are and how things will behave without some references next to you. After learning the basics of those things, I still can't figure out how to get Dreamweaver to generate a web page that properly utilizes these technologies, and Dreamweaver is like the best wysiwyg editor out there, so stay the hell away from it. Incorporate a little PHP, and you can even do includes that allow you to update a bit of content that appears on every page site-wide.
I found many of the links on this web page quite useful.
To be more on topic with the original question, I'm with the "just learn html/xhtml/css" group. In my experience and from what others far more experience in web design than myself tell me, for almost any half decent website, you're going to have to go in and fix/modify code generated by Dreamweaver, Frontpage, etc. anyway.
If he really doesn't want to learn right now I would recommend going with something more along the lines of any one of the various blog/portal applications that are out there which generally provide a clean, semi-professional, look out of the box and are easy to add content like pictures with some text to or an app pre-written for a picture gallery.
The things you learn. Honestly, the logistics of setting up a site properly to eliminate the old problem of having to make the same change on a million pages are still quite opaque to me (who am currently building my own video game mini-API from scratch). Nevertheless, to throw together a fountain pen web site, you can get by without knowledge of that.