I am working with a small NGO that wants to put up a web site for the first time. They plan to use a lot of photos of their work on the site. The staff is quite competent in all standard office software, but has not done web design before. What program do you recommend? The staff uses both Macs and PCs. From others both Dreamweaver and Kompozer have been recommended. What do you think of them?
Hi Rebekah,
Dreamweaver is a good choice -- I've been using this program for years and highly recommend it to people.
The only thing is that if your staff is new to Web design, DW will take them a little bit of time to learn. But if you're NPO isn't pressed for time and your people are ready to "get their hands dirty", then by all means go with DW. There's a small learning curve, but anyone can learn the program.
Google Page Creator is another option I often recommend to nonprofits, like yours, who are looking to develop a basic Web site without all the fancy bells and whistles. The neat thing about Google Page Creator is that it's free and requires no technical skills, eliminating the learning curve. GPC lets you build your site very quickly and easily, and the site is hosted on Google's Web servers (you get up to 100MB of space).
Think about using Google Page Creator if your NPO wants to have a basic site up and running quickly. (Note: If you have lots of pictures to post you'll want to make sure that Google's 100MB will be sufficient space for your needs.)
But go with Dreamweaver if you're looking to establish a more fancy type of Web presence. In this case, you'll need to find a Web host to host your site for you.
I'm sure others here will also have more recommendations for you as well.
Hope this helps!
Yann
Joined on 10-22-2004
TechSoup Member
There are a lot of new online tools that are aimed at helping people create quick & easy websites. Though I don't think anyone's created *the* perfect tool yet, there seem to be many more offerings than there were even a couple of years ago.
Webnode is a free tool that allows you to create a free website w/blog, and lets you use your existing domain if you have one.
There is a handy
blog post comparing hosted services (the post title refers to sites for small businesses, but this works for small nonprofits as well). Their main problem with Webnode is that they say the interface isn't as easy to use, and its not as easy to download your own content, as some of the other offerings (such as
Weebly).
Microsoft Office Live also offers a free website with email, and from my limited interaction with it, seems very easy to use.
WildApricot is another option with a greater emphasis on membership. Since some of these are free tools, it might not hurt to sign up with a couple of them and do test drives to see which one fits your needs best.
If you don't want to go with a hosted solution, I haven't seen/heard about anything that's better or more popular than Dreamweaver (which nonprofits can get at TechSoup Stock), or the open source alternative
KompoZer. For those who are completely new to the game of website production, if you go with a non-hosted web design option like Dreamweaver, you'll need a hosting service such as
DreamHost.
Joined on 07-07-2007
TechSoup Member
Hi. Some nice suggestions so far. I think it all depends on how much of the website you will be doing. Will you be controlling everything including hosting? And how much you want to be involved.
As someone mentioned Google Sites is good but really hard to make a "design". They have so many customizations but in the end, everyone will know that you are using google sites.
Dreamweaver is obviously the main contender, but if you are using Macs I want to recommend a program called Panic Coda. Its very good.
Joined on 01-05-2005
TechSoup Member
We are in the process of changing to Sharepoint. It does a number of things besides a website. You have to find a someone to host it. There are different rates. we found a company in Nova Scotia that is really reasonable.
As Canadians, we are concerned, rightly or wrongly about having our website hosted in another country where it might be subject to their laws.
My recommendation if you want to be able to build your site without a lot of fuss or tech knowledge is to use something called a "Content Management System".
A CMS basically allows you to modify pretty much everything about your website using built-in web based tools. Adding functionality can be done using plugins. Design is achieved using templates.
The two most well known open source CMS are Joomla & Drupal.
I recommend Joomla in most cases but both are great. IMHO Drupal is a little more ideal for people looking to create online communities or blog sites. Joomla is easier to manage, especially for non-tech users.
Either one is good and both come with fantastic community support. Both require a web server with PHP and MySQL.
One thing I recommend for sure is to NOT use Microsoft Word to create web content as it writes terrible code, but that can be said for just about any WYSIWYG editor.
A good alternative to Dreamweaver would be Kompozer which is free.
Cheers,
-n8
I'm curious to know how these products are stacking up in the accessibility arena these days. I know Frontpage and Dreamweaver used to be pretty sub par in regards to the accessible code they would produce for you via their editors.
I checked out a GPC site that a coworker created not too long ago and was surprised to see all of the embedded CSS and odd browser hack code inserted into each and every page. Web standards compliant it was not, and in turn I questioned its overall accessibility.
It has been years since I've looked into the Web Accessibility Initiative, but it might be worth another look - especially to check out what tax exempt organizations are expected to comply with under law. I know in the past any of our projects that recieved federal funds were required to be compliant.
Joined on 05-16-2008
TechSoup Member
FrontPage is no longer available from Microsoft. Microsoft Expression Web is the new replacement. So far, I've been using it and found it to be much more accessibility compliant. However. . . the caveat to it and any other HTML editor is that the person creating the code is really the one responsible for if something is accessibility compliant.
The editor can certainly create the styles and code for you on the fly, but it's going to be up to the person coding to decide if the CSS belongs in it's own file and move the code or if it should stay in the head tags of the file.
I had a person helping me who used Dreamweaver and maybe she didn't have things setup correctly but I found a lot of tags that I had to close manually when she sent files to me because Dreamweaver hadn't closed them to be XHTML compliant.
If someone needs info or training on accessibility regarding Section 508 federal government compliance they can find all the info they need at
www.section508.gov.
I'm curious to know how these products are stacking up in the accessibility arena these days. I know Frontpage and Dreamweaver used to be pretty sub par in regards to the accessible code they would produce for you via their editors.
I can't speak for FrontPage (I haven't used it in years), but I can tell you that Dreamweaver has a come a very long way towards producing accessible Web pages. I've been using DW since 2000 -- the DW of those days produced a lot of bloated and gibberish code that often puzzled me and most people as well.
While I don't consider myself a Web accessibility guru, I can honestly say that those days are long gone as today's Dreamweaver produces clean, compliant code. If you look "under the hood" as you're using the program to build your Web pages, the code generated is much more robust and standards-compliant. I won't say it's perfect, but DW has definitely improved in this area by leaps and bounds.
For more about Dreaweaver and accessibility, you might be interested in checking out this resource:
Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 accessibility overview
Yann
Joined on 01-08-2006
St. Paul
Joomla.
CS3.
Firebug for Firefox - CSS, Javascript, code check
Blogger.
Wordpress.
...in that order.
Basically at this point I use Plone (CMS) and then its the web browser. So here's a list.
Plone - Has a good built in rich text editor so that helps.
Firefox with:
Web Developer Toolbar
Firebug
Header Spy - provides easy access to page info
Colorzilla - Good for stealing color schemes
It's All Text - Use a text editor to enter into text areas
Measure It - on screen tape measure
A good text editor. On Windows ConTEXT. On Linux Kate (KDE Advanced Text Editor) for use with Its All Text in Firefox.
I've used a bunch of the free HTML editors on Windows and they all have pluses and minuses. Currently I'm using Roden Web Editor for some XHTML templates. On Linux I use Quanta.
TopStyle Lite for CSS work is useful also.
Cool that you guys are using the excellent Firebug extension for Firefox. Unfortunately this extension didn't agree with my current version of FF (3.0.1). So I got rid of it.
I use the HTML editor built into Dreamweaver. Same thing for CSS; I write up the code for the Web pages then use the CSS editor in DW to fix any issues.
Yann
FYI - FireBug has been updated and is working perfectly on FireFox 3.1. I use it everyday along with DreamWeaver and PhotoShop.
Joined on 04-02-2008
TechSoup Member
If I am using a CMS, Drupal with TinyMCE graphical editor installed.
For coding, I use Notepad++ for HTML, CSS and PHP. I also use TopStyle Pro for CSS if I happen get stuck.
For the testing/browsing, Firefox with the following addons: Web Developer (really handy for inspecting forms, css, html, page file sizes, etc.) , Firebug, Colorzilla, Measure It
I've tried using Dreamweaver, GoLive, Front Page, etc. and always come back to Notepad++. There is nothing I hate more than handing over my beautiful, legible code to editors which then decide how they want it structured. :)
Joined on 10-05-2004
TechSoup Member
All great suggestions here. I was going to choose DW but the only way to get it on TechSoup now is to get the whole suite. Not something my non-profit budget can swallow right now.
So it looks like a CMS and perhaps an open source tool or two!