Beginner’s website software

The wife has asked me to have a go at redesigning her school website.

Can anyone recommend some easy to use software that I can get to grips with easily.

Obviously I don’t need anything fancy, just the basics.

Thanks

Isn’t this a bit like: “Please can I have step by step instructions for building a pyramid?” ??

whatever you do, dont ask the guys who made the STW site

No, I don’t know anything about web design, I know that there’s software out there that does the basics and I’m hoping that someone can recommend some.

But thanks for the input anyway SFB.

Serif Webplus[/url]is good. Not a bad price at only £60.

Also, look at some of the CSS template sites to get an idea for a style and download the template for it. Will save loads of time.

No its not like building a pyramid.

My 10 year old used an off the shelf kit to build and maintain a very basic one which he uses as an unofficial school site for his mates.
I know very little about HTML and little about domain registration but it was easy to find a site that allowed very basic stuff like this.

Yahoo Site builder is pretty good for beginners. Lots of templates that you can change to suit or just use as they are, and you don’t need to know any html either. Plus it’s free.

Nowadays IMO the only way to build a website is to learn HTML and CSS and code it yourself. WYSIWIG website software is horriable (with the exception maybe of CS3/CS4 Dreamweaver). I’m not sure exactly what you are using the website for but if the website is going to be used for commercial purposes then get a web designer to do it otherwise you are going to make a really bad impression to potential customers/students. Give us a link to the existing website and maybe we can give some better suggestions. My suggetion download Notepad++ or another text editor for free and learn HTML and CSS- the learning curve may be bigger initially but the finished product will be much better.

But thanks for the input anyway SFB

what I mean is, it’s very easy to create a bad website 🙁

Nowadays IMO the only way to build a website is to learn HTML and CSS and code it yourself. WYSIWIG website software is horriable (with the exception maybe of CS3/CS4 Dreamweaver). I’m not sure exactly what you are using the website for but if the website is going to be used for commercial purposes then get a web designer to do it otherwise you are going to make a really bad impression to potential customers/students. Give us a link to the existing website and maybe we can give some better suggestions. My suggetion download Notepad++ or another text editor for free and learn HTML and CSS- the learning curve may be bigger initially but the finished product will be much better.

Personally having done this the hard way, and then re-done it using a content management system, I’d say that if you’re hard-coding content pages in html/css, you’re doing the wrong thing. Content Management Systems are great, they save you tons of time, and make your site better and more consistent.

Particularly for something like a school website, where you can expect to update things frequently, and where you often want to let multiple people create updates to the site easily.

What you need for this is some web space where you can host scripts and a database, and some kind of content management system installed. If your current web space is on any decent kind of provider, they should be able to sort you out with a basic MySQL setup, and install Joomla or similar free content management system for you.

<http://www.joomla.org&gt;

Once you have that installed, it is worth knowing a bit about html / css if you need to modify templates, but writing the actual content is done on the site itself, it’s pretty much as easy as writing comments on here, so you don’t need to know loads about html to create content. It is also much quicker than writing full html sites, and less likely that you’ll screw something up so that it doesn’t work on some web browsers or whatever.

Joe

I’m not knocking CMS (I’ve used them on a number of websites I’ve made) but they are no substitute for a good but knowledge HTML and CSS (and PHP). CMS are not for beginners to setup however they do alow for easy updating of the website by people with no knoledge of web design once they are up and running. If you do go down the CMS route then get a web developer to do the initial setup of the site and get you going. Otherwise if you are just wanting something simple and non dynamic I would suggest learning some simple html and css rather than a using a WYSIWYG editor.

It seems a funny situation that someone would ask their husband who appartntly has no knowledge of web design to design a website for a school- I think we need more information about what you are trying to acheive.

I know I’m going to get flamed for this, but I know nothing about website design and was able to use Microsoft Frontpage to build what I’m informed is an acceptable-looking website (click my name to see it). The code is messy, and it won’t win any design awards, but the software is easy to use if you already use Office, and it’s easy to edit the site once it’s up.

It also helps to have a bit of knowledge of HTML so you can check what the program’s doing behind the scenes and I found http://htmldog.com useful for this, even if some of the tutorials are pretty dull.

I’ve been looking into this myself and indeed asked the same question before xmas.

serif webplus x2 is very well regarded and can be had for around 40quid. even some guys on this forum rated it as a basic tool that produces reasonable results.

webplus 10 is more basic, but very easy to use and can be had for around 20quid.

if you want super basic consider mr site which is under 20quid.

if you do a google search for reviews you will pick up some useful info, http://www.computerbuyer.co.uk is good.

@ Mr Agreeable. Quite a good site- simple and does what it needs to. However there are a few minor problems when using a browser other than IE (with IE usage falling and chrome firefox etc growing this is not a good thing) this is one of the major failings of a number of these editors the worst being frontpage. This is fine when the website is for something like a trail group where it isn’t really important what people think of the website but for a school websie you need something professional looking.

To be honest if you just want a non-dynamic site with the basics then something like seamonkey[/url](free) will do the trick perfectly well, we do a brief lesson on it to first years to give them an appreciation of basic web devel. Personally I generally end up falling back into raw HTML editing if I’m doing that sort of thing though, and notepad will do that, but its not very beginner friendly. I now use CMS as I just couldnt be bothered with the setup, structuring and relative difficulty in setting up a vaguely dynamic and secure site. Hardest job with something like e107 is setting up the database and changing theme to something you like.

Cheers Spesh99, and yes I’m aware that some of the formatting comes out a bit funky when using other browsers. That said, it got me doing it, whereas coding by hand requires a lot more care and skill than I possess, and mucking about with Dreamweaver et al just left me feeling baffled.

Dreamweaver is a beaut – just a tad pricey last time I checked.

1. you can throw a lot of cash at a site, even using seemingly creditable design companies, and it will still be shite.

2. you may be a whizz at programming but it does not necesarily mean you can design (aesthetically or functionally).

I built a perfectly reasonable website using Nvu and a little bit of HTML that I’d picked up along the way.
As an non IT type I liked it coz it’s easy, free and doesn’t seem to cause problems between IE and firefox. Before that I used Frontpage but Nvu seems easier and betterer.

Thanks for all the input.

Spesh99. Firstly I’ve been asked by my wife because I’m quite good on the PC and school can’t afford to pay someone to professionally design a site.

This is the site here:

school

As you can see it’s an absolute mess!

All I’m aiming to do is give a simple look with a better design.

I’ve downloaded Nvu and I’ll give that a bit play, obviously I’m hoping to pick up HTML on the journey.

I’m also looking at other school websites for good and bad design.

Mr Agreeable. Liking your work fella. 🙂

If you want to just pick up a bit of html and stuff like that easily then check out

w3schools html

They make learning html and other web languages quite easy.

Can’t really say about any website dev software as I’ve only ever used notepad++ and coded my sites raw

As it’s for a school you should be able to get an education discount for the software. E.g. Dreamweaver is £90 from Adobe.

Nvu and a nice simple CSS template – i have used a variety of free / paid templates before. I would not go from scratch if you are short of time/skills. Cut n paste works wonders…

Job done

Personally I’d get in touch with the Northumberland county council web hosting people (I’m guessing they host it for the school from looking at the whois data), and ask them if they could set you up with a simple content management system. They are great, they help you organise things nicely and avoid the horrible spaghetti of links that haven’t been updated for ages mess that the site is currently.

Although if that isn’t possible, you should be able to make something fine with a WYSIWYG editor as long as you don’t use word / frontpage etc. To be honest, you can’t make things worse than the site is currently, even a basic completely text site would be better than that.

Whatever you do, when you’re making it, think about how you are going to update it. There’s no point in having a website if it isn’t easy to update (both by you and by whoever replaces you in looking after the website at some later date).

Joe

Lol at the “our church” link. If you go to the root domain (rather than the faulty link) you’ll see the subliminal messaging on their home page – a giant image in the centre of the page that says:

GENEROUS

Sustained Local Christian Presence