Web building software (1 Viewer)

I am using Incomedia WebSite X5 Evolution for my website but I am having problems with it erasing photos every time I try to update it - with the result that I've lost my rag big time this evening and used about two months' worth of swear words on it at full volume!

Can anyone please recommend some reasonably inexpensive software for building a website? By inexpensive I mean less than £100. Dreamweaver is out, simply because it costs in excess of £300 and I can't justify that kind of cost, let alone afford it. :-C

Many thanks

Fay

Do you use Windows or Mac?

If you use a Mac then Coda gets really good reviews, although I've not used it myself:

I'm using Windows 7, my (very old) copy of Dreamweaver won't work on this machine and, besides, it's about a million years old in software terms (I got it in 2003).

What about Notepad++? I doubt it's got the same level of functionality as Dreamweaver, but you could give it a go since it's free http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ - I'm assuming you can code in HTML and CSS, otherwise this might not be suitable.

I can in HTML but my CSS skills are non-existent.

It may be worth putting in a little time to learn. It's actually not hard, in fact it's very easy to learn, where it can get difficult is if you're doing complex page layouts, but really, it is very, very easy to learn. And once you know the basics, you'll find that you get so much more control over your web pages than you would using front-end views like Dreamweaver offers.

I use Dreamweaver in work, but always use the code view.

If you're thinking of developing new sites, have you considered WordPress? It's originally designed for blogs, but people use it to design websites these days, and it comes with a content management system similar to what you're used to with Dreamweaver.

Thanks JTweedie, I'll look into that.

Hi Fay,
A couple of ideas.
Design etc in X5 as your used to then upload the files to your server with a seperate ftp programme.
Filezilla is good and is open source.

http://filezilla-project.org/

Or if your interested with playing with something new have a look at ZenPhoto.
It's a CMS designed specifically for image gallerys, but is also a full blown CMS as well.
Open source, good forum and helpful devs.

You should be able to open a Zen site in X5 and tweak the css, html etc to personalise whatever template you choose to start with.

My site is built with it.

http://www.zenphoto.org/

My favourite is Joomla. It can do almost anything, having many available extensions and modules. It certainly beats using Dreamweaver, which is very painful.

It isn't really intuitive, though. I learned it using a book called "Joomla Explained", available on Kindle.

Alan

Thanks for the replies, everyone! :t:

Very useful is legendary HomeSite v1.2, i.e. to pick color codes.
Among new software Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2010 Express (maybe they released '2012 version). Probably very good are Adobe's programms like Adobe Dreamweaver CS6, but they are not free.

For php you need to install Apache server, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python on your computer - in case of Windows using WAMP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_WAMPs
It is not so easy to install it. That software creates server on your computer in chosen directory. I use VertrigoServ to make and test simple php scripts, like these ones: Tatra mountains, glaciers, personal www (maybe they don't look proffessionally, but this is only my fault !). Links to their copies on the PC look like these ones:
http://localhost/subdirectory_name/file.php or http://127.0.0.1/subdirectory_name/file.php
(VertrigoServ must run to open this), but files physically are located here in my case:
E:\Program Files\VertrigoServ\www\subdirectory_name\file.php
In the past I used Krasnal [=~Dwarf] Server. This second one was very good too, but some problems began since changing default hard disk drive letter from C to E. The links looked like this one: http://127.0.0.1/~domain_name.com (or other extension) in case of domain.
Using such software you can install on your computer WordPress, Joomla, Mambo, Coppermine gallery, phpLinkDirectory, phpBB, probably vBulletin and all other scripts available in the internet and for example test their modifications before uploading them to the internet.
The same for other platforms:
List of Apache–MySQL–PHP packages
All these packages including WAMP contain i.e. phpMyAdmin you can use to manage MySQL database, if your script needs such one.

Very popular are also Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP files) - server side scripts like php.

But the easiest way to create professionally looking webpage is perhaps to open an account on one of many portals available in the internet. Even some of professional servers like Yahoo Small Business (php, MySQL) can install php scripts for you (WordPress and many others). You need only push one button. Or you can upload whatever you want from your computer, for example your own html or php files, using Yahoo's webpage or Total Commander for example.

SeaMonkey contains HTML editor. Many years ago it was part of Mozilla's Netscape Communicator.

lots of good replies here . I've only ever built 3x websites and all of them were done in microsoft Publisher its basically wysiwyg can't get any simpler than that MS Front page is even better although a bit more gimick heavy .

You can simply select a page format then import images and size and place them where you want then write text on the page in text boxes then periodically you can pre-view what you have built as a webpage .You can build a basic webpage and upload it in under 10 minutes!

Add extra pages and links and fades and other gimicks .

Save it and upload it :t: What could be simpler than that ?

There is "Bluefish" open source package available.

[FONT=verdana, sans]Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and webdevelopers, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages.[/FONT]

Click to expand...

http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/index.html


phil