Oct
18
BAISNet’s Favorite Tools for Creating Web Pages
October 18, 2006 | Tagged baisnet BAISNet |
I posed the following question to my colleagues on the BAISNet listserv yesterday:
Hi All,
I thought I would utilize your collective expertise once again! What are your current favorite software applications for wysiwyg webpage creation? I’ve lately been working with websites that have built-in web-based page editing, so I feel a bit out of touch. When you want to make a page from scratch, what do you prefer? Dreamweaver? FrontPage? BBEdit? Coffee Cup? Something else? Low-priced would be a definite bonus.
Thanks in advance,
Barbara
The overwhelming majority of folks from BAISNet seem to be voting for Dreamweaver, with many of us moving toward CMS technology and web-based page creation tools. Here’s my original email and a summary of responses:
I have used DreamWeaver in conjunction with BBEdit for about 7 years now. I love the wysiwyg, PHP, SQL integration in DreamWeaver and I wouldn’t part with BBEdit as my baseline text/html editor ever. I have used quite a few others (GoLive, Front Page…) but have always ended up back here.
~Chris
Ditto from me!
~Kathryn, Nueva
Go with the gold standard — Dreamweaver. Easy to understand, powerful. I have not had good experiences with FrontPage…MS adds to much fat to the html code.
-Matt
Barbara,
I still like the Macromedia tools, Dreamweaver, etc. You will probably qualify for a lab pack, about $500 for a lab set of the entire suite. Good deal.
Shelly, Hillbrook School
I use Dreamweaver, but I am really a novice. It came as a suite with flash etc.
Anne Marie Schar, Technology Director
Mid-Peninsula High School
Hi Barbara,
I like Taco HTML Edit, and it is free! It is made for the Mac OS (if that is what you have). I use it because I want my student to learn how to make basic HTML etc, etc.
http://tacosw.com/main.php
Best of luck,
Barney, The Carey School
We use the Macromedia Suite, which for a commercial product is very affordable as they charge a flat fee based on school enrollment. If you have lots of people who are doing web site development, it’s hard to beat since there are so many training resources available and you can get in deep or just wade in the shallow end of the pool.
iWeb is hard to beat in terms of ease-of-use, it’s free with new Macs, and will get better with time. Downside is that it really likes to publish to .Mac accounts and makes you jump through hoops for anything else. I’ve heard that the HTML it creates is not the most elegant.
~Steve, Castilleja
Hi Barbara,
I use Dreamweaver because it’s so simple. I have 4th grade students create a “my first web page” in Dreamweaver and if they can do it it’s gotta be Easy. Also, I use iPhoto all the time to create web pages of kids work beacause it is FAST! In the information box you can add a title and add text in the comments box. Then have it appear where you want it to appear. I can take these instant iPhoto pages into Dreamweaver and doctor them up. Here is an example where the photos and captions were done in iPhoto and
the page enhanced in Dreamweaver:
http://www.kdbs.org/lower/05-06/third/milly/milly.html
Scanned work with text:
http://www.kdbs.org/lower/05-06/third/3bpuppets/3bpuppets.html
KidPix:
http://www.kdbs.org/lower/04-05/second/2astories/2astories.html
~Peggy, KDBS
We have given up on complete web site creation tools and moved to web-based content editors instead: blogs, CMS’s, and wikis (Wordpress, Nucleus, Plone, Drupal, Mambo, MediaWiki, DokuWiki, etc.). When instructing a class to post subject-related work or a program director to maintain his program web site, these systems allow the user to get directly to the content, usually the most important part. Web-based systems also provide functional tools that most WYSIWYG coders can’t build — comments, tags, subscriptions, and more. If you are seeking to teach design, you can teach how to modify the templates of such systems or create one’s own. Creating a solid
template and a concise CSS file are more authentic tasks for today’s web world than creating a static design from scratch.
Richard
re: CMS’s vs Web development tools
I agree wholeheartedly with the distinction that Richard brings up. What’s the goal of the lesson? The content or the tools to create vessel for the content? Or both? CMS’s allow you to focus entirely on the content without having to worry too much about the mechanics of producing a Web presentation.
Hoover, Schools of the Sacred Heart
RE: Hoover’s and Richard’s points:
I’d actually say CMS’s allow you the flexibility to learn css/html, or concentrate on content — content creation is much easier using any of the CMS options in this thread, and once you have the app up and running, creating a web page is as easy as typing and hitting submit –
However, if you want to learn html/css, you can dig into the theming engine of the app — this is a pretty safe and effective way to learn design, as you can create test/experimental themes to work with, while retaining the original (aka pretty/functional) theme as a point of reference. Also, on a tangential note, the Xinha firefox extension puts a WYSIWYG editor into your firefox browser — this gives you WYSIWYG editing on any textarea, on any web page — it can come in handy. — http://www.hypercubed.com/projects/firefox/
Cheers, Bill F.
