I strongly second the motion for SiteSpinner. I built this site for a local youth choir without any prior training in website construction. The days of learning HTML and hand-coding pages are, I think, rapidly coming to a close.

What I really, REALLY, like about SS is that it's not only WYSIWYG, but free-form. This is in contrast to many other site-building programs out there. Here's an analogy: ever have to do an org chart or a graphics-intensive presentation? You can, in theory, do the whole thing in MS Word, but anyone who's tried to do so knows that there's more to the project than just selecting a WYSIWYG program. After all, Word faithfully replicates on paper what you build on the screen. But what a miserable tool--yes, you can create graphical elements and move them around the page, but you're stuck with a "word processing" mindset and it's not very intuitive. On the other hand, if you use Powerpoint, the program is not only also WYSIWYG but also free-form in that you can create graphical elements with ease, and shift them around the page with abandon. Just like SiteSpinner.

There is a penalty to be paid for this flexibility: the underlying code is deeper than if you had hand-coded the thing from scratch. But from what I can tell, the penalty is relatively slight, especially these days when many people have switched to Broadband.

By the way, one other feature of SiteSpinner is that there is a very useful forum supporting the product. I really believe that if MS were to buy SS and then re-introduce it to the market, critics around the world would be hailing this "brilliant" new program as a touch of genius by those Microsoft wizards.

I suggest you also look at Namo WebEditor 2006. You can find it on www.namo.com and get a free trial. It frequently has price reductions in places like CompUSA (That great Mexican company), to as low as about $50.00.

It is a VERY comprehensive program and I have made dozens of commercial and non-commercial sites using it. It allows a complete WYSIWYG editing mode, or you can switch to code (which is VERY handy for certain things), or you can do both at the same time.

A top notch program.

I haven't used Namo, but you might want to check out the reviews on amazon.com before leaping into this. I thought the suggestion to try the trial download especially helpful.

Jack

Naturally, it depends on what you want the website to do and who it's intended for.

For a long time, built and maintained my site using FrontPage, which was OK, but probably way too complicated for a little old "business card" site.

I recently redid my site using Swishmax, after hearing about that program on this board. I bought the program, and one of their "Dynamic Swish Sites" and without any prior knowledge of Swish, or Flash, I was able to get what I think is a much more contemporary look all in about 2 days. If you click on my name, you should be able to see my profile and the website listed there.

Pierre

PierreB,
All I get when I try to open your website is a blank screen and an adblock note using either Internet Explorer or Firefox.

John

Hi John,

"All I get when I try to open your website is a blank screen and an adblock note using either Internet Explorer or Firefox"

Thanks for that feedback (and the interest).

It is a flash site, so does require a Flash plugin. When I tried it on another computer here, Firefox popped up a little notice saying that an additional plugin was required to display the media on this page. Once I'd downloaded the plugin and installed it, the site ran fine.

Strange. And I'm insufficiently techy to troubleshoot something like this. What software is the adblock notice from?

Pierre

Pierre: Does a flash plug-in come with the package or must you go buy Macromedia?

Mike

I am running Firefox 1.5 and the site and music work fine for me. I was just looking at setting up a web site myself and looking for software to write it.

Mike,
You only need the free Flash plug-in. You do not need Macromedia. If you need to modify a Swish site, you need Swishmax. It's not very expensive, especially compared to Macromedia.

Pierre,
Like your site a lot. Which Swish Site is it please?

Cheers,
tom

I use NetObjects Fusion (www.netobjects.com).

The most popular used to be Dreamweaver and Netobjects (used to be considtently the Editor's Choice for PC Mag). NetOjects used to be private, then was purchased by IBM, who sold it (as they do so often) to Web Pros. I have used NetObjects since 1.0 (now it is on release 9.0).

I've created over 45 sites with this application including:

www.chanimal.com (my namesake)
www.videobackstage.com
www.coolpianoteacher.com
www.zebraimaging.com
partners.alphasoftware.com
www.cri-austin.org (sponsored by Michael Dell's foundations)
www.southsidepawn.com
www.TopChoiceHL.com

and the list goes on.

Relatively easy to use (once you understand about the stylesheets), requires no coding, able to do both complex (Chanimal has over 200 web pages) and simple sites (CoolPianoTeacher.com has a few).

Hope this helps,

Ted

Ted,

The videos stream very well from videobackstage.com
Who are you using for a web host?

John

Tom,

Sorry for delay in answering, I missed your post.

Thanks for the nice words, the Swishmax site is "modular", one of the 3 dynamic sites. I also made one for my spouse's watercolour habit (www.belislewatercolours.com) that uses "square squares", another dynamic site.

The music are loops made with SonicFire Pro. All photo resizes & transformations made with Irfanview.

All of those programs were bought as a result of comments on this board!

Pierre

Another vote for sitespinner here. I've used it on two sites. Couldn't be easier.

Thanks. I downloaded the SiteSpinner trial and it looks great. Good tutorials too. It's so simple after FrontPage it's difficult to believe it can make a pro looking site!

Michael

Also, the forum there seems under-utilized but whenever I had a question, it was always answered in a timely manner and usually by a guy named Bruceee.

j razz

For somebody just starting out I too recommend SiteSpinner. However I like to get down to the html, create templates,etc and was using Homesite for that. After a lot of Googling and trying out programs I recently found what I think is a superior alternative to Homesite which I'll be using to help modify and design a friend's site. It's called "WebBuilder 2005." You can find it at http://www.blumentals.net/webuilder/. Only $40 bucks.

I should look into Swishmax also.

Craftech,

I use www.startlogic.com. I found them over a year ago from Jay Gladwell, who also uses them for his site with streaming video.

Very good, cheap, plus they have live voice support (my avg wait time is about 30 seconds).

Craftech,

I use www.startlogic.com. I found them over a year ago from Jay Gladwell, who also uses them for his site with streaming video.

Very good, cheap, plus they have live voice support (my avg wait time is about 30 seconds).
========
Thanks Ted,
Between you and Jay, I'm sold on startlogic.com and probably Site Spinner as well (Riredale told me about it a year ago).

Regards,
John