OT - Software : Webpage design for muppets

Woollyzone said:

Hi all. I'm asking this here because I know many of you have got great
looking (yet apparently simple) pages for your trail reports, and I want
one! However, among the drawbacks in doing one, I am an html muppet, and
am therefore seeking recommendations for a good, cheap, easy to use
wysiwyg program. I see that Webuser mag recommends one from coffeecup.com,
which is quite cheap - has anybody tried this? I don't want to pay a
fortune, just want one that will enable me to knock up a reasonably decent
set of pages with emphasis on photo galleries.

Any guidance gratefully received.

nvu (www.nvu.com) has just reached version 1.0. 7Mb free download.
--
Dave

"Dave Pickles" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

Woollyzone wrote:

nvu (www.nvu.com) has just reached version 1.0. 7Mb free download.
--
Dave

Cheers Dave, I've now got that and it looks reasonably muppet-friendly, so
thanks for that.

Woollyzone said:

Hi all. I'm asking this here because I know many of you have got great
looking (yet apparently simple) pages for your trail reports, and I want
one! However, among the drawbacks in doing one, I am an html muppet, and am
therefore seeking recommendations for a good, cheap, easy to use wysiwyg
program. I see that Webuser mag recommends one from coffeecup.com, which is
quite cheap - has anybody tried this? I don't want to pay a fortune, just
want one that will enable me to knock up a reasonably decent set of pages
with emphasis on photo galleries.

Hit there,

I've used the Coffeecup one on and off for several years, and it seems
ok to me. At the moment, though, I generally use something called 1st
Page 2000 by Evrsoft. It's free - see http://www.evrsoft.com/. I find
it works ok, but the Coffeecup one may be a little easier for someone
who hasn't used an HTML editor before. Still, there's no reason not to
give it a try. Why not get HTML for Dummies or something simlar and
try it out with the Evrsoft thing?

Good luck!

Best wishes,
--
,,
(**)PeeWiglet~~
/ \ / \ pee AT [guessthisbit].co.uk

Dave Pickles said:

Woollyzone wrote:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Any guidance gratefully received.

nvu (www.nvu.com) has just reached version 1.0. 7Mb free download.

Seconded. I've never used a commercial HTML editor but Nvu seems to do a
good job. Produces quite reasonable code too.

--
***My real address is m/ike at u/nmusic d/ot co dot u/k (removing /s)
http://www.unmusic.co.uk - about me, music, geek sitcom etc.
http://www.unmusic.co.uk/amh-s-faq.html - alt.music.home-studio FAQ
http://www.unmusic.co.uk/wrap.php?file=vhs.html - vhs purchase log.
http://www.unmusic.co.uk/ukodb - uk outdoor bargain noticeboard.

Woollyzone said:

Hi all. I'm asking this here because I know many of you have got great
looking (yet apparently simple) pages for your trail reports, and I want
one! However, among the drawbacks in doing one, I am an html muppet, and am
therefore seeking recommendations for a good, cheap, easy to use wysiwyg
program.

wysiwyg is not a term that can be applied to editing HTML, because you
can't predict the window size, font zoom, browser, screen resolution
etc. etc. etc. that any given viewer will be wearing.

Basic HTML is pretty easy, easy enough to largely pick up from examples,
and all you need for examples are the pages you like, as your browser
will be able to display the source code from any page it renders. Steal
a few you like, jiggle the layout a bit, and there you are.

HTML editors can be handy for elaborate sites and getting things off the
ground in the first instance, but HTML is simple enough that hand coding
allows more easy tuning. One thing to consciously avoid is an editor
that hardcodes presentation data into HTML tages (typically <font>
tags). These are much better and more flexibly handled by cascading
style style sheets, which give you cleaner HTML and vastly simplify
changing the look of your pages (e.g. decide on a bigger font across 5
pages, change one variable in the style sheet file, against changing
every single <font> descriptor in 5 different documents).

Pete.
--
Peter Clinch Medical Physics IT Officer
Tel 44 1382 660111 ext. 33637 Univ. of Dundee, Ninewells Hospital
Fax 44 1382 640177 Dundee DD1 9SY Scotland UK
net [email hidden] http://www.dundee.ac.uk/~pjclinch/

In message <[email hidden]>, Woollyzone
<[email hidden]> writes

Quoted message said:

Hi all. I'm asking this here because I know many of you have got great
looking (yet apparently simple) pages for your trail reports, and I want
one! However, among the drawbacks in doing one, I am an html muppet, and am
therefore seeking recommendations for a good, cheap, easy to use wysiwyg
program. I see that Webuser mag recommends one from coffeecup.com, which is
quite cheap - has anybody tried this? I don't want to pay a fortune, just
want one that will enable me to knock up a reasonably decent set of pages
with emphasis on photo galleries.

Any guidance gratefully received.

Web Album Generator from:

http://www.ornj.net/

works well for photo galleries. The price is also right.

Regards
--
Neil Pugh

I see they also do a text editor:

http://www.ornj.net/software/araneae/

I haven't tried that, but it's also free.

Regards
--
Neil Pugh

Don't know how far you've got, but I started out merely designing a
page in Word & then saving as HTML. When you re-open it through
Internet Explorer, you can right click on it and press "view source" to
edit the HTML code in Notepad. It's frustratingly long-winded and
dull, but surprisingly effective at actually learning HTML.

Quoted message said:

From there you can move onto the advanced stuff, known as "nicking code

from other people's websites" - find a website that does what you want
to do, view source, cut & paste relevant bits into your HTML & amend as
necessary! There's also numerous websites offering free code - just
search google (other search engines are available...) for "Free HTML
code" or "Free Javascript code". You'll need Javascript if you want
your website to do anything even slightly posh - HTML is rather limited
in functionality.

If you get really into it, you're probably going to end up getting
Dreamweaver which seems generally regarded as the best web authoring
software. It ain't cheap to buy though.

Cheers

Anth

PS. Feel free to nick code from www.wheresthepath.com

I don't know how far you've got - I started out just doing pages Word &
doing "Save as HTML". When you then open the same document in Internet
Explorer you can then just right-click and "view source" to edit the
HTML in Notepad. Primitive and long-winded I know, but surprisingly
effective for actually learning HTML.

Quoted message said:

From there you can progress onto the advanced programming technique

known as "swiping code from other people's websites"! This tends to
become vital when you want to do flashy stuff as Javascript tends to be
to incomprehensible (to me at least!)

If you get really into it you'll probably want to get hold of
Dreamweaver, which I think is generally accepted to be the best web
authoring software.

There's plenty of websites out there offering free code to do specific
stuff - just use your fave search engine to look for "free HTML code"
or "free Javascript".

Cheers

Anth

PS. Feel free to swipe code from our site at www.wheresthepath.com

Many thanks to all who responded - there's some good looking programs there,
have downloaded 3 of them and will have a look to see what they can do. What
I particularly like about them is that they are all free!

Cheers folks

(expect a dead posh gallery up & running soon...)

Quoted message said:

Don't know how far you've got, but I started out merely designing a
page in Word & then saving as HTML.

Not recommended. Word is designed to edit on fixed paper sizes with
hardcoded font and format specifications (i.e., actually genuinely
wysiwyg) while Web pages don't work that way. As a result the HTML is
unlikely to be very good and you can draw all sorts of wrong conclusions
about formatting.

Pete.
--
Peter Clinch Medical Physics IT Officer
Tel 44 1382 660111 ext. 33637 Univ. of Dundee, Ninewells Hospital
Fax 44 1382 640177 Dundee DD1 9SY Scotland UK
net [email hidden] http://www.dundee.ac.uk/~pjclinch/

Woollyzone said:

Hi all. I'm asking this here because I know many of you have got great
looking (yet apparently simple) pages for your trail reports, and I want
one! However, among the drawbacks in doing one, I am an html muppet, and am
therefore seeking recommendations for a good, cheap, easy to use wysiwyg
program. I see that Webuser mag recommends one from coffeecup.com, which is
quite cheap - has anybody tried this? I don't want to pay a fortune, just
want one that will enable me to knock up a reasonably decent set of pages
with emphasis on photo galleries.

I'm just using a simple plain-text editor. I've made a template for my
photo pages and a little shell script that embeds the photos from each
walk into the template. All I need to do then is to add the descriptive
text. Doing it manually has the advantage that not keeping it simple
is painful...

My entire work web site is done by text editor - the number of html
tags you have to learn is no more than, say, twenty. No worries!
--
Rudi Winter, Aberystwyth, Wales
http://users.aber.ac.uk/ruw/album