Good Tool to Make a Website?

I used to use frontpage express but that's pretty dated. What's a good tool these days to make a good website?

No notepad responses please...

www.nvu.com

...or even KompoZer - Nvu's "unnoficial bug-fix release".

Apparently the new Microsoft Expression tools are very good:

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/default.aspx

Not used them myself however.

Ooooh, even with Nvu you probably aren't going to escape having to manually edit the source code, I'm afraid. You still need to learn the quirks of CSS in order to know what to ask for, and by the time you've picked that up it will be simpler to just type your rules manually than try to coax them out of the editor. (And God knows why the CSS editor isn't positioned where the Site Manager is, but they've made it pretty painful to experiment -- being able to see exactly how your DIVs are nested while having your list of rules handy, as you can with a couple of Notepad documents, is a surprisingly efficient way of effecting CSS.)

Once you've got some sort of template set up it looks like a decent program for editing actual content, does Nvu. Just store yourself for the fact that you might well end up setting up some of the more interesting stuff longhand.

Nvu/Kompozer is pretty cool. I like the ftp publish feature. Too bad it's not a WYSIWYG type editor though. :(

OMG my website really sucks. See for yourself.

www.ZamaGames.com

EDIT: Bah...just have to find the right template.

I wrote something in BlitzMax to generate my site... that worked fairly well. I had a few specific reasons to not use php (about half the generation was image manipulation) but I'd probably just bite the bullet and use that in the long run.

You will get notepad responses, because that's the correct response. You don't write your games in Click & Play, after all.

Its a pity that Kompozer was done without the consent of the original author of Nvu.

As such, he's got the huff on and hasn't updated Nvu for years, and apparently the creator of Kompozer isn't doing any more work on it either.

No frills NOTEPAD.exe

I used to use FrontPage too but now I prefer Notepad++ (is that allowed as it's not notepad it does code highlighting etc.)

We don't write them in machine code, either.

Flash, when it´s used right.

Learning HTML is as easy as purchasing a product or two from http://www.visibone.com/

We used this tool for a few commercial sites, cheap and easy.

http://www.hexagora.com/en_home.asp

Thanks Knotz I'll give that one a try.

Dreamweaver used to be quite good.

The problem with WYSIWYG website tools is that what you get is invariably nothing like what you saw. If you don't understand the HTML and CSS behind the page, you'll be lucky if you get a page which looks the same in one browser as it looked in your "WYSIWYG" tool, let alone across all browsers and resolutions.

I concur, Gabriel. You really do need to at least learn the basics of HTML/CSS (it aint that hard). I used Nvu in the past, which is great for the most part, but it would often generate some hideous HTML. I needed to spend quite a bit of time in the source editor. I doubt a true WYSIWYG web tool exists, TBH.

Why? If he wanted control over who did what with his source, he shouldn't have opened it up in the first place.

It's also ridiculously slow.

It still is. Don't know about the Adobe version but I think you can still get MX 2006 somewhere.

Basicly you can't go wrong with Dreamweaver or a HomeSite/TopStyle combo. Also if you're on a budget, CoffeeCup and HotDog are more affordable editors.

Lately I thought I better use an Editor that offers some nice looking templates, produced by a real artist. It's not notepad that sucks, but my lack of artistic skills.

Impossible. Must be your ISP or your computer. I'm using the same hosting service as pjio and gameproducer plus my page is very small with no css or scripting yet.

I'm just after a simple site that's easy to update. Sorta like GA's site. It's straight and to the point and looks a treat to update with new stuff.

Must have took you hours to get your tables set up though!

Well.. You can let me do the site if you want Chroma..

Hey Damp, I'm at work right now but I'll email you when I get home.

He has a point, although I think he's referring to the image of the book, which is nearly 200k.

I think it's because you're resizing the image in HTML - the actual GIF is 402x584.

Just had a play with it in Photoshop. That image at display size (150x218), comes out at as low as 5k without looking any different to the one you're using:



Basically your version of the image is sucking up 37x more bandwidth than it needs to.

Use PHP its great.

If you want editors try:
Matrix Y2k on windows and Bluefish is nice on linux ( both free and good enough for me anyway :)

Takes all code forms: html, php, css, blah blah blah...

WYSIWYGs suck, they always dump loads of unreadable crud in the file, wasting internet bandwidth and never seem to port well between editors.

Actually, if you're going to go there, you might as well use Ruby on Rails. At least then most of the hard work is already done for you.

Ah you're right. I totally forgot I had done that. Just fixed it.

You may want to try MS visual web developer 2005 express edition. I've downloaded it but have not messed with it yet. Been messing with the C# version.

Take Care

I second the Visual Studio suggestion, it has an pretty good HTML editor. I use it at work to sping things up quickly. You might want to find something that runs on a server though, you will need to use a FTP program to upload the HTML you create with VS.

Visual Web Developer (totally free): http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vwd/
I suggest FileZilla for FTP: http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/
And DreamHost for hosting: http://www.dreamhost.com/

I'm using FTP to publish my site on liquid web. I've been tinkering around the site a bit. I want a very colorful, aqua button look to it. Still working out the layout though. I just want it easy to navigate and vivid.

Does everything line up?
www.zamagames.com

I had a quick try. Looks fine in Opera and Firefox.

IE6 ( as usual ) looks wrong.. The home button is hanging half outside the page. Also your using .png's with transparencies... Im afraid IE6 cant handle those correctly so they are being displayed without the transparency applied.

Ditch the long horizontal bars. They confuse things. Replace them with a slightly smaller area of blank space.

Also the logo looks (to me) like 'Zamo games' - which takes me back to my Grange Hill watching days.

OMG! Bars!

Do I get a point for color coordination?!

Well I closed the page 30 seconds ago and I can still see blue, so it's certainly vivid. It could stand being a little less saturated TBH.

I'm chipping in with ASP.NET, I quite like knocking the guts of a website up now and again with a little VB! :)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vwd/

Dabz

I gave MS Office Publisher a trial run once... Ug. A blank web page with a colored background generated about 56k of HTML. As far as I'm concerned, if you want anything streamlined, efficient, or customized exactly as you want it, there's just no substitute for your own hard-coding. I guess it's like they say... "If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself."

Ah well. Welcome to Earth, in the year of 6.5 billion B.C. (Basket Cases)

Guess I'm off to the book store to get an html book then! One with CSS and javascript stuff in it too.

UK mag PC PRO carries Netobjects Fusion 9 full version on the cover disk for *EDIT* June 2007.

Andy

Netobjects 8 seemed fairly good to me, but their marketing guys spammed me with mail about the latest version, so I'm not a fan of the company in general.

I use Sitespinner. It's got a few bugs at the moment, but the devs are always on the forum dealing with issues (many revolve around their vector drawing tools, which you can easily replace with Inkscape), and it's very enjoyable to use. It's also fast, and it's cheap... unlike Dreamweaver.

It's about as close to a WYSIWYG editor as you can get with every browser *caugh*IE*caugh* creating their own standards.

PHP is quite easy to learn, it kind of does all those things you always wished html did.

As for editors, try Matrix Y2K (its free and has some code gen. tools, color code view and other handies). Although theres probably a lot better out there by now.

As gabriel and big10p said above, WYSIWYG tools tend to suck. They generate heaps of unformatted, unreadable code, 97% of which isn't even needed, so you end up with a fat slow website.

Sitespinner seems pretty good on the code front...

Net Objects Fusion 9 is free on..... sorry brain fart..... Pc Pro this month in UK if I rember correctly. :)

I use it for quick sites and its really quite good, though I have to say I am not an expert.

I too get emails from the net objects peeps, but I think there is a way that yoo can unsubscribe from them.

Cheers

Garion