Easy beginner software

I think I'm dealing with similar issues to Gilesyh.

Some background first. I'm a volunteer with a family, busy job, kids, Scouts, and an occasional life. But I have a driving ambition to help my organization and the web is one of the best ways to do it.

Our group truly recognize the value of a website (ours gets over 7,000 hits a week nationwide - pretty good for a "small town" historical society). Our too-few volunteers (including myself) wear too many hats already, and none of us can afford to learn to be well-trained graphic-web designers. (That's even if we had the creative capacity to be that. I live in awe of good design!)

Unfortunately, for all it's traffic, my site looks like a 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61 Chevy that was put together one piece at a time.

What I would love is a simple package that will let us adapt a good looking template to what we need. FrontPage hints at this, but their templates are pretty amateurish from what I've seen. I know Dreamweaver has some -- or you can buy some -- but we're back into my needing to spend quite a bit of time learning the program. (I already own DW MX and it's collecting dust on a shelf - pretty sad I do admit.)

Now, I've even approached a few designers to help on this. Unfortunately none can help either as donated labor or at our "slave-wages." Our group would be willing to buy a basic template for $100-200 that I know will work for us - or that we can get help with. This template needs to be something I can just take, use FP to update (sorry guys, I just know it too well), and move on to my next NPO emergency.

I suspect that's what Gilesyh and so many others of us want .. at least until we find a volunteer who is smart enough to do the web site correctly.

There are numerous online resources for NP's to take advantage of, most of which are free.

When it comes to web building, the following will be helpful:

http://www.openwebdesign.org/

hth,

Perhaps a good rule to follow is to ensure that your web development efforts are proportional to your desired web benefits.

It is very much a "return on investment" mentality. If your organization's site is not that important to your cause, then it does not warrant a whole lot of investment in time, money, or energy.

That is your organization's decision to make. Like most everything else, you get out of it what you put into it.

Marc:

Thanks for the tip on http://www.openwebdesign.org/

And to all others, thanks for your ideas, experiences, and thoughts. Some work for my situation. Some don't. But all are helpful. And I appreciate the time you're spending to try to help.

Guy

I feel similarly. I use the analogy that to write articles and presentations, I don't need to know the code to use Word or Powerpoint. All I need to know is how to use the tools in the application. The better I know the tools, the more complex my product can be, but I can do alot and know very little anyway. It should be the same for web site development.

Several years ago I used Adobe Pagemill to do our websites. There was a learning curve, but it was relatively easy. Pagemill morphed into GoLive which was more complex and more difficult. I did a couple of web sites with it, but wasn't too happy. The last couple of versions of GoLive are so complex that it is beyond my capabilities.

But the good news is that for Mac users there are two wonderful answers to do websites easily and with style and no coding required. They are RapidWeaver which is basic, easy to use and cheap; and Sandvox which is elegant, has lots of options, and is easy as well. Sandvox is still in beta and can be downloaded for free. They expect to go public next month. I can't wait!

My initial response when I read this question was, "no, there is no such software."

On futher reading, I like the comments Dunxd tclaremont and West7th on this. Several others have chimed in about the "investment" factor and costs, so i won't go there. But here are some other things to consider (and I by the way consider myself to be a "professional web designer" in addition to running an NPO.)

The Web is changing very rapidly in many ways and I expect that in less than five years it will look very different from what we have become accustomed. The primary factor moving this is the nature of the "user agents" that people use to interact with web data. More and more of us will be accessing web data with devices other than "browsers." Devices to access web data like PDAs, cell phones, automobile GPS units, are now on the market. This means that web content and web design need to be separated and flexible because you are no longer building a website for Internet Explorer and Netscape.

The rapid growth of blogs and RSS feeds are a perfect example of the explosion. People want to access the information from anywhere at any time and will not be carrying around a browser with them.

The new generation of MS web design software Expressions, appears to be MS's attempt at getting ahead of this curve. Given the fact that they have been behind for about five years means they have a lot of catching up to do. With the merger of Adobe and Macromedia, look for even more advances. The usage of multimedia is just in its infancy.

And, by the way, Dreamweaver is now available in the TechSoup Software Products section for I believe $25. But DW is not an easy program to learn. And you need to learn CSS too.

So my recommendation is to find the resources to hire a professional to build your NPO's initial web presence in a way that will give it some shelf life. It needs to be built to standards that will be applicable in the years to come.

If you are looking at a big site, you may want to consider a Content Management System (CMS) which removes all of the design elements and lets staff handle only the content. The system can start with a standard and relatively simple template and then as the new features develop, you can add these to the template.

If you're looking for a good HTML editor, I'd suggest ACE HTML. You can find it in an online search. Ver. 5 is free. Ver. 6 is cheap. Learning curve is really short and the program is powerful. You may also want to consider contacting a local college to see if they have anyone who'd like to intern. You can ask for samples of their work. Be careful if you do this - some interns may want to use Front Page and can really make a mess out of it. Getting a recommendation from an instructor is a good idea.

Over the past 10 years I've learned more and more about web design from a technical standpoint. Unfortunately I don't really have the eye for making the things of beauty that I see, but I do make pages using html editors and not drag and drop type editors.

That being said, in the beginning days, I found that Netscape Composer was the least offensive about putting in a lot of heavy excess code. That might be a good cheap choice. http://wp.netscape.com/communicator/composer/v4.0/index.html

I'm curious if anyone has used something that will do proper css by inserting class in the tags and a stylesheet link to a stylesheet which, of course, the program would also assist one in making. Now that would be of interest to me!

Anita
http://cpprovince.org/archives

While I do not know of any programs that will create an automatic style sheets, Dreamweaver has some templates with associated style sheets. Try working with one of these for a while and you will get to know CSS a lot better. By the way, I would not recommend inline styles , try to keep them all in an external style sheet for better control and performance. You will also only have to change them in one place if you ever decide to and not on every page.

Another inexpensive Windows HTML editor is Coffee cup HTML editor. You can download a free version, but the $50 paid version has a visual editor, where you can do things without using HTML. Of course, if you really want to tweak your page, you are going to have to learn HTML. 8- )

Their software has free upgrades for life, and they sell many other tools that work with the editor, and would enhance your web page. http://www.coffeecup.com/software/

I feel similarly. I use the analogy that to write articles and presentations, I don't need to know the code to use Word or Powerpoint. All I need to know is how to use the tools in the application. The better I know the tools, the more complex my product can be, but I can do alot and know very little anyway. It should be the same for web site development.

unfortunately, that will never be the case. you are trying to compare client applications that run in a controlled os environment implemented with one or two low-level, compiled languages (c++, java, etc.) with web design software that needs to implement dynamic browswer/page/widget (dom) features that interact with server-side scripts, run with multiple programming languages (ruby, php, javascript, etc), communicate with back-end databases (mysql, postgres, etc.), and parse documents for data portability (xml). you can not compare that complexity with Word or Powerpoint applications. plus, the web has not completely made it's transition to better standardization (xhtml+xml). this makes it harder for any web dev software to work like word or powerpoint because not all browsers render pages the same. creating web-based documents (forms, applications, etc) will always require someone to write code of some sort due to the internet's complexity.

In summary...

If you want to make a website, it is trivial.

If you want to make a website that behaves equally well across all web browsers and platforms, conforms to the widest array of standards, performs well in search engine queries, caters to those surfers with disabilities, preserves a professional, consistent look and feel throughout the application, makes use of dynamic content, does not barrage your visitors with obnoxious banner ads and adware / spyware, provides the highest percentage of "up time", allows interaction with the end user, etc. etc. etc. It is quite a feat.

yes..