Free web page builder

  • Thread starter Thread starter Martin R. Howell
  • Start date Start date
Hy,
Would someone suggest a better free web page builder than Nvu?
Click to expand...

I know, there can be problems with it, but what are _your_
problems?

There is another thread about this around these days:
"Is there a wyswyg html editor out there that actually works?"
It features some short reviews of other programs, but I cannot
follow the original poster with his result in sticking with
"Frontpage Express", but decide for yourself.

Regards,
Thorsten
 
Martin R. Howell said:
Would someone suggest a better free web page builder than Nvu?
Click to expand...

A decent text editor + some HTML/CSS knowledge.

Really, WYSIWYG editors can *not* give you the full range of possibilities
these technologies have. NVU is surely not a bad WYSIWYG editor, but if you
feel limited by the possibilities it gives you, it's time to move ahead and
start coding yourself.

Regards,
Wald
 
Thorsten Duhn said:
There is another thread about this around these days:
"Is there a wyswyg html editor out there that actually works?"
It features some short reviews of other programs, but I cannot
follow the original poster with his result in sticking with
"Frontpage Express", but decide for yourself.
Click to expand...

That would be me. FP has flaws largely as a result of it's age - no CSS, no
support for more recent HTML - but one clever thing the programmers did with
this one that I've not seen elsewhere is to allow some flexibility for the
growth of future HTML. Thus, you can put in more recent HTML by using the
"insert html markup" feature and the program will happily accept it.
However, your html won't show up in the wysiwyg screen -- doesn't matter for
my purposes as I can easily visualize the results. The markup is relatively
clean. What remains can be tidied up with a basic search-and-replace text
editor.

Another neat feature not seen anywhere else : Javascript or other
"unrecognized" code show up in they wysiwyg screen as small boxes with an
question / exclamation mark in them. When editing saved pages you can
quickly go through the page, delete these boxes and -- voila -- it removes
the whole block of code. No wading through the hand code.

Another clever feature is the ability to "insert file here." You can work on
some smaller part of your site and once it's perfected, you can insert it
precisely where you want it. Other programs such as NVu have a similar
feature, but it's less refined. (Trivia note : FP was licensed to another
company whose name escapes me right now and they re-issued it with a name
like Coffee Express or similar. Except for the fact menu items were slightly
re-arranged, it was the same program, right down to using FP help file.)

Somebody in the other thread reminded me of Composer (NVu is the son of
Composer). I quite liked that one -- it has a few less capabilities than NVu
but, unlike NVu, it handles the basics well. I've re-installed it and am
probably going to stick with it for now.


M
 
Would someone suggest a better free web page builder than Nvu?
Click to expand...


PsPad is a great editor for many occasions. You can write your html
and view it. It uses your default browser to view. It can check your
code for missing or mismatched tags too. It has syntax highlighting
for html and other programming languages.

http://www.pspad.com/en/


A quick reference for basic html, css, or xhtml:

http://www.w3schools.com/

A quick html\xhtml checker: PsPad should find any errors

http://validator.w3.org/


I've always enjoyed plain and simple html pages, so that's what I
write. Once I get the heading and basic layout I save it and copy and
paste from it when making new pages. Your needs might be greater, but
you can still do whatever you need with this editor.
 
Martin R. Howell a écrit :
Would someone suggest a better free web page builder than Nvu?
Click to expand...
I've been using Trellian's WebPage and have been quite happy. I like the
3 tab feature - editor/preview/code. Right-click context menus are quite
good. But judging from monitoring the group - I seem to be the only one
using it. However, I like a site that doesn't make your head spin - no
music, no jumping or flashing - just decent content. Tho I think WebPage
can do these things.
 
Wfromoz said:
Martin R. Howell a écrit :
I've been using Trellian's WebPage and have been quite happy. I like the
3 tab feature - editor/preview/code. Right-click context menus are quite
good.
Click to expand...

I recently tried this thing again. However, I found that once I created a
table I had no means of modifying it. I would highlight the table, but when
I went to use the table menu to do things such as add rows, columns, merge
cells - whatever - it was always greyed out. Nothing I did could get it to
work. Have you had that problem?

M
 
A decent text editor + some HTML/CSS knowledge.

Really, WYSIWYG editors can *not* give you the full range of possibilities
these technologies have. NVU is surely not a bad WYSIWYG editor, but if you
feel limited by the possibilities it gives you, it's time to move ahead and
start coding yourself.

Regards,
Wald
Click to expand...

When not using my paid-for editors I often use textpad. The
regular expression search & replace feature is often invaluable
and I prefer it to either Adobe's or Macromedia's (and, unlike
those, Textpad never crashes). I never really trust the WYSIWYG
features of these editors anyway; better to open up a browser
window on your page.

Surely the most moronic job ads are those demanding that you use
Dreamweaver; I think it's better that you know how to avoid
Dreamweaver.
 
Michael Laplante a écrit :
I recently tried this thing again. However, I found that once I created a
table I had no means of modifying it. I would highlight the table, but when
I went to use the table menu to do things such as add rows, columns, merge
cells - whatever - it was always greyed out. Nothing I did could get it to
work. Have you had that problem?

M
Click to expand...
No, I haven't. I've built a number of pages with tables using WebPage. I
have found myself tabbing over to the code, tho, to ensure the
width/height of cells when a specific size is necessary. It's a bit
clumsy on the wysiwyg side, tho the context menus do allow cell by cell
definitions, ie size, alignment, color, etc.

I must now admit that since my original post I received a gift - the
Macromedia Dreamweaver etc suite. I now have my first & only payware
nestled on my laptop. Hope the others don't give it too much grief haha
 
If someone has a recent unwanted OEM WordPerfect CD, often
included with Dell systems, you can try that out as an HTML
editor. It at least works far, FAR better than Word for
publishing to HTML. But you would likely be better off using
the Composer module in Mozilla.

I just tried out Nvu and it locked up the first time I tried
to add a non-mispelled word to its dictionary. Luckily I had
just started and didn't lose much. It's obviously still an
alpha-stage product even though it being presented as being
near 1.0 release. It looks promising, though. Yeah, I've also
looked around for a solid free WYSIWYG from time to time and
I've lost track of all the web editors I've downloaded and
tried out, only to return to Netscape/Mozilla Composer. I
likewise will do direct HTML coding afterwards to cleanup
and tweaking, but I want something fast, simple and easy for
the initial composition. You would think by this time that
there would be at least as many good free WYSIWYG HTML
editors as there are word processors, but....

-BC
 
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