What website editor is easiest to use?

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I desparately need a web site editor that is easy to use. The secretary in my office tries to use Sharepoint Designer but she is frustrated with it, doesn’t understand it, and the program makes occasional strange changes to default.css that damages the webpage and then I have to try and fix it. I need a website editor to make at least minor changes to an existing website with as little complication as possible. Does anybody have any recommendations? The primary criterion is EASE and SIMPLICITY of use as well as reliable operation without glitches. If it’s free, that would be great. Thanks for any suggestions.

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I’m not familiar with Sharepoint Designer. Do you use it locally and then upload files to the server, or does it edit directly on the server?

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My understanding is that Sharepoint Designer is the standard Microsoft webpage editor and is a successor to FrontPage. Page editing is done locally and then modified pages are uploaded to the website. Sharepoint Designer is quite powerful and complicated, but difficult and confusing to use for a secretary that doesn’t have much computer background. I’m looking for an alternative that is easier to use, hopefully free, and doesn’t make errors in page generation. It doesn’t have to be as powerful or flexible as Sharepoint Designer. I have looked at Nvu but it seems just as complicated. I’m not sure what other options might be available.

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My understanding is that Sharepoint Designer is the standard Microsoft webpage editor and is a successor to FrontPage. Page editing is done locally and then modified pages are uploaded to the website. Sharepoint Designer is quite powerful and complicated, but difficult and confusing to use for a secretary that doesn’t have much computer background. I’m looking for an alternative that is easier to use, hopefully free, and doesn’t make errors in page generation. It doesn’t have to be as powerful or flexible as Sharepoint Designer. I have looked at Nvu but it seems just as complicated. I’m not sure what other options might be available.

I’ve been using HTML-Kit for a few years, and have found it to be the easiest of all those I’ve tried – including FrontPage, CoffeeCup, and three or four others –

http://www.chami.com/html-kit/

HTML-kit has a built-in ftp client, but I found Mozilla’s FireFTP addon to be far simpler to upload files with, and it has an added bonus of editing online at your web site (it’s an addon for Firefox). FrontPage adds far too much ‘garbage code’ for my tastes, making it more complicated than it needs to be. CoffeeCup is not free, and the others are full of bells and whistles that are not really necessary. HTML-kit has tabs for handling Text, CSS, HTML tags, tables, frames, and other stuff.

Doug Simmons

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SharePoint Designer is the follow on product to FrontPage for use with SharePoint web sites. It just happens to be able to be used with regular web sites also. There are quite a few SharePoint specific features that would not make sense for a non-SharePoint site and would most likely confuse anyone not familiar with SharePoint.

If you are looking for a Microsoft product see Expression Web. It is a really good tool for producing standards based web sites. However, it is NOT free.

Joe

--Joe

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Thanks Joe, for your suggestion. I don’t really care whether we use a Microsoft product. I’m just looking for something simple that works well on relatively simple webpages. I’ve never heard of Expression Web, and it does seem expensive for us. How simple is it?

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It is may be more complex than you wish but then “relatively simple” is in the eye of the beholder. Expression web is a top notch professional grade product. That said I’ve found it fairly easy to use.

Joe

--Joe

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I haven’t tried this yet, but it’s more up-to-date than Nvu: BlueGriffon[/url].

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Try WYSIWYG Web Builder.

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Thanks for the additional suggestions. I will check them out. Any other suggestions with the basic requirement of ease of use would be welcome.

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Expression Web is your best bet. WYSWYG editing plus the power get better. There is a great deal on Expression Studio Upgrade for around $50. The Expression design is also powerful. HTH.

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What website editor is easiest to use?

The one that you know the best. Maybe need to look at several and attempt to determin which one is easiest for you to learn.

I find Arachnophilia very nice and easy.

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There must be a million of them out there, and I admit I have tried none, but one that has at least some good reviews is WebEasy. It does have a free trial available.

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The first, and best, piece of advice I received when starting to build a website is – don’t pay for fancy editing software. I use two free HTML editors, Aptana Studio which has a page preview facility so that you can see what you have done, and Notepad++, which has recently acquired a spell-check

Dell E5570 Latitude, Intel Core i5 6440@2.60 GHz, 8.00 GB - Win 10 Pro

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There is a good resource from Coffeecup software – they have plenty of free tools, and a good html editor too (but you need to pay for that one – but it’s cheap!)

If you need to do simple up to complex websites, look for Dreamweaver (now from Adobe). It is a fantastic editor that can do everything from simple html pages to complex interactive database driven sites.

If you need a simple tool to edit, amend and update a website, then look to a simple Content Management system. The easiest to install and use that I have found is called Tandemserver – but it runs on a Windows machine, requiring Dotnet 3.5. If you are looking for something a little more customised, then look to something like Drupal or Joomla (which are free php/mysql applications that run on either windows or linux servers) but they do take quite a bit of setup initially.

In the end I use a combination of all these methods for developing and maintaining sites. I do find that I am moving more towards a CMS rather than plain web pages. It makes keeping the links together much more simple, and Tandemserver has all sorts of features that you can use (or not). I highly recommend going that route, because the html editing is all done through your web browser – no software to install, and all you need is an internet connection.

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One that I’ve heard a good deal about in its ease of use and price (free) is Kompozer.

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As it happens, I still use the old FrontPage for simple Websites. It’s as easy to use as Word, is virtually bulletproof and bug-free, so intuitive that I’ve never once looked at any Help doc.

The only drawback is that it’s not easy to actually upload your Web pages directly with FrontPage, so I gave up on that a long time ago. You can use any other uploader without problems. I’ve used both WS_FTP and Dreamweaver.

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If all you need your secretary to do is to update text content (as opposed to changing layout, adding pages, etc), we have had success in setting our clients up with CushyCMS (http://www.cushycms.com). This would allow her to edit pages directly on the web, in a word-processor-like interface, with minimal risk of messing up the code. http://www.pagelime.com/ is another competitor, which looks good, but which we have not tried. (And no, we don’t work for or get referrals from Cushy 🙂 ). It’s relatively easy to set up.

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I agree with the comment that Frontpage adds too much “junk” code even though I do use it occasionally for special needs. My primary html editor is AceHTML, the freeware version. They also have a $$ pro version. AceHTML is not a WYSIWYG editor although it does have a builtin viewer and can launch your browser if desired. As a webmaster I have tried dozens of editors and have been using AceHTML for many, many years and have found it to be the simplest and easiest to use. It has only one problem that I have found and it really isn’t much of a problem; after launching AceHTML, if you move your cursor to the task bar before opening a file, it will terminate. This has happened on every computer that I have used it on. Oh, and a big plus for me is that AceHTML works in every version of Windows that I have used, from 95 right through to Win7. (I liked Coffecup and Arachnophilia, used HotDog for several years, liked Kompozer (for a WYSIWYG editor). Oh, well, enough of my ramblings…

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I agree with the comment that Frontpage adds too much “junk” code even though I do use it occasionally for special needs. My primary html editor is AceHTML, the freeware version. They also have a $$ pro version. AceHTML is not a WYSIWYG editor although it does have a builtin viewer and can launch your browser if desired. As a webmaster I have tried dozens of editors and have been using AceHTML for many, many years and have found it to be the simplest and easiest to use. It has only one problem that I have found and it really isn’t much of a problem; after launching AceHTML, if you move your cursor to the task bar before opening a file, it will terminate. This has happened on every computer that I have used it on. Oh, and a big plus for me is that AceHTML works in every version of Windows that I have used, from 95 right through to Win7. (I liked Coffecup and Arachnophilia, used HotDog for several years, liked Kompozer (for a WYSIWYG editor). Oh, well, enough of my ramblings…

I forgot to mention Arachnophilia! A great Java-based program by Paul Lutus, and I still use it to edit multiple files at one time. My genealogy pages are constructed with gedtohtml, and I sometimes open, edit, and close 100 files at one time (mass generic alterations) with a very handy ‘global find and replace’ feature. It’s the only program I’ve found that does that easily and quickly, although I suppose any program is the easiest after we use it for years! I’ve never seen AceHTML, but I will take a look at it.
Doug

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I took a quick look at AceHTML – it’s almost a clone of HTML-Kit (or vice versa), although I’m sure there are some differences in details. I’ll download it and see what it’s got 🙂

Doug

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I use NetObjects Fusion Essentials – which, as a non-techie, I found relatively easy to find my way around. NOF Essentials is the free version of the much bigger but award-winning NetObjects Fusion XII.

http://netobjects.com/

http://netobjects.com/html/essentials.html

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Thanks for all the suggestions. I’ll be trying to organize the possibilities next week. Any other suggestions are still welcome. Just to clarify: in order to change from Sharepoint Designer, I want to be as sure as I can that a new option actually is easier, especially for a non-technical user. If it’s not free, then that’s even more important. It’s true that there are dozens of options; is there a review article anywhere that focuses on ease/simplicity of use?

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I desparately need a web site editor that is easy to use. The secretary in my office tries to use Sharepoint Designer but she is frustrated with it, doesn’t understand it, and the program makes occasional strange changes to default.css that damages the webpage and then I have to try and fix it. I need a website editor to make at least minor changes to an existing website with as little complication as possible. Does anybody have any recommendations? The primary criterion is EASE and SIMPLICITY of use as well as reliable operation without glitches. If it’s free, that would be great. Thanks for any suggestions.

iPage @ $50+/- a year including webhosting uses the Weebly drag & drop sitebuilder and is extremely EASY.

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Rfarmer, your secretary should try asking in a secretaries or similar forum. People there should have a better understanding of what she/you mean by ‘ease and simplicity’.

Lugh.
~
Alienware Aurora R6; Win10 Home x64 1803; Office 365 x32
i7-7700; GeForce GTX 1060; 16GB DDR4 2400; 1TB SSD, 256GB SSD, 4TB HD

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I’ve used NVU, which is a free open source page builder with a real wysiswyg interface that lets you slip back and forth between code and what your page actually displays. I’ve used it for years and though it isn’t the most modern option it is more than adequate for my needs and easy to use as well.

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I think you may be looking more for a CMS WYSIWYG editor. http://ckeditor.com/ is very much a great one and very comprehensive but
you can search for a simpler one much like the one you use to edit your posts here in this forum.

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Well you have gotten a lot of answers here. I’ll tell you what I did for the owners of the last place I worked as IT, and recommend to others today. Some of the website hosting services offer their own online website creation tools that are very easy to set up. To edit text or pics you just cut and paste in edit mode, and when you are done and happy with the preview, publish it to the web. I first used one with Earthlink many years ago using their version of Trellix, a software design tool that is template based. I now use GoDaddy for hosting and website design for simple and easy websites as well as more complicated ones. They have some very nice packages for Website tonight or whatever they are calling it now. I come in and get the websites up, then turn it over to the owner/s of the company and with an extra hour of handholding they are able to take it from there. Do take a look at Go Daddy and their do it yourself offerings. Many folks make light of the websites designed with templates, but using a web design package that costs a bunch most owners only use the templates and basics and spend big bucks for results that are sometimes less than what they could do with a simpler interface that is also tailor made for the online hosting company to boot. I do not work for them, or anybody else for that matter, being semi-retired and self employed. Check whoever hosts your domain and website for a ready made program. I have made some pretty impressive and clean websites using them. Sure I can use HTML and clean up the bloat from complicated programs in a novices hands. Why? I don’t want to be on call for anybody anymore, nor responsible for the long term with anybody not wanting just a start like you are asking for here.

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I like Serif Webplus. It’s easy drag and drop. I haven’t used their latest version but they’re really good programs.

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Dreamweaver is paid but will surely have all your needed features. So if you’re serious with your web designing career, you’ll definitely need it.

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Depending on what your secretary actually has to do with the website, I’d first recommend learning some basic HTML. Joe Barta’s http://www.pagetutor.com is an excellent free source. It is somewhat dated, but still has some great information. I’ve tried most all editors over the years and without some basic HTML knowledge, there are going to be problems.

The editor that I keep coming back to is “1st Page 2000”. It’s free and has all the features that a good editor needs, and more. It may be difficult to find, but well worth the effort (most links will try to take you to “First Page 2006” which is not the same, not as good, and costs money!). Even the author’s site doesn’t have it any more. I did find it here: http://www.slunecnice.cz/sw/1st-page-2000/ (can’t vouch for the site, though).

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Depending on what your secretary actually has to do with the website, I’d first recommend learning some basic HTML. Joe Barta’s http://www.pagetutor.com is an excellent free source. It is somewhat dated, but still has some great information. I’ve tried most all editors over the years and without some basic HTML knowledge, there are going to be problems.

The editor that I keep coming back to is “1st Page 2000”. It’s free and has all the features that a good editor needs, and more. It may be difficult to find, but well worth the effort (most links will try to take you to “First Page 2006” which is not the same, not as good, and costs money!). Even the author’s site doesn’t have it any more. I did find it here: http://www.slunecnice.cz/sw/1st-page-2000/ (can’t vouch for the site, though).

alphawave, When I went to the website for 1stPage 2000, I discovered it’s in a Slavic (Czech?) language. Is there a way to view this website in English? Is 1st Page 2000 itself available in English? If so, how would I access the English version of this website editor?

Thanks for helping me find the English version of this program.

Charles

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I have not tried any of these, but you might like to try Wix Free Business Website Builder[/COLOR]. Wix looks fascinating, and it ranks first on Google under The Top 10 Website Builders of 2013.

I ended up there after googling Corel Website Creator, which I happen to have but have never actually tried. It came as a bonus with CorelDRAW X6, and you can download a trial version, but the critics almost unanimously disliked it.

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I have not tried any of these, but you might like to try Wix Free Business Website Builder[/COLOR]. Wix looks fascinating, and it ranks first on Google under The Top 10 Website Builders of 2013.

I ended up there after googling Corel Website Creator, which I happen to have but have never actually tried. It came as a bonus with CorelDRAW X6, and you can download a trial version, but the critics almost unanimously disliked it.

Dogberry, As the website for Wix Free Business Website Builder is in a Slavic language (Czech?), I find it confusing. Is there a way to view this website in English? Is this program available in English? If so, how would I access the English version of this website editor?

Thanks for helping me find the English version of this program.

Charles

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Dogberry, As the website for Wix Free Business Website Builder is in a Slavic language (Czech?), I find it confusing. Is there a way to view this website in English? Is this program available in English? If so, how would I access the English version of this website editor?

Thanks for helping me find the English version of this program.

Charles

I confess I am bewildered myself. I realized after posting that it was probably pure advertising that I had inadvertently passed on, but the link given takes me to an English-language site at least, with no indication of a Slavic language. Anyway, if you are getting something other than English I suggest that you skip it entirely, and my reference to it being a Google choice is something I now question myself.

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Hi Charles,

There’s a more recent version of 1st Page – 2006, available from what seems to be the originating site in Australia – in English: http://www.evrsoft.com/

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Satrow, Well, I tried this link and downloaded the program. When I subsequently ran my antivirus, it detected malware named “badjoke.” After deleting the malware, there was no trace of the file I had downloaded.

I found (Actually alpha wave found it.) another site: http://www.pagetutor.com/common/toc.html. Hopefully this will work better.

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This is not exactly what you asked for, but it may lead to excellent freebies that you can use. Google itself, because it is so intimately connected with advertisers who use it (or try to), has a ton of available material, which you can find by googling ‘google web’ which will lead to a large number of hits produced by Google. If you google ‘google fonts’, for example, you will find a vast number of free fonts, many or most of which are so-called web fonts which are optimized for use on the internet, similar to the handful of web fonts that Microsoft made available a number of years ago. They also have top quality fonts, often of the same name as the web versions, which are optimized for print use. I confess I was working from the opposite end in my interest, in that I was interested in fonts for print use.

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Thanks for the report and sorry for that, Charles.

I’ll remove the link/post. Virustotal analysis for it: https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/f7740dc531026053e3d8674ff716bd2f927ea30808da4613c0a3c817228fa3af/analysis/1375796901/ (seems to indicate joke/hoax, so may not be malicious, more of a nuisance?).

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Coming late to this discussion, I would note that, of the free editors,
VNU ceased to be worked on by the author(s) many years ago, and was succeeded by
Kompozer, which has had very little meaningful work done on it for several years, is fairly buggy and generates abysmal HTML code, and the current recommendation is now
BlueGriffon, which I haven’t used yet.

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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I’ve just run a number of checks on 1st Page 2006 from the Evrsoft Aus. site; my conclusion is that it’s clean – yes, it does contain a ‘joke’ script but there’s nothing malicious about it. I’ve put my earlier post back in place.

Virustotal result for the ‘offending’ script: https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/9331ae0491cd17f024f3767a041e22c4442be46913060153b90f56724349c581/analysis/1375816629/

Should you wish to delete the joke file after install, it’s this one: C:Program Files (x86)Evrsoft First Page 2006IscriptsGamesgames-scripts.izs

Here’s the actual code for it:

Code:

Scary virus uploader


Uploads FAKE viruses onto your HD (don’t worry, JavaScript isn’t that powerful).
 

games





window.onerror=null;
var down;

function Minutes(data) {
        for(var i=0;i<data.length;i++) 
                if(data.substring(i,i+1)==":") 
                break;  
                return(data.substring(0,i)); 
}

function Seconds(data) {        
        for(var i=0;i<data.length;i++) 
                if(data.substring(i,i+1)==":") 
                break;  
                return(data.substring(i+1,data.length)); 
}

function faketake(percent1){
 if(percent1 < 100){
   percent1++;

   window.status="Upload of virus in progress: "+percent1+"% complete";
   fid1=window.setTimeout("faketake("+percent1+")",200)



 } else {
//   alert("Upload of hard drive complete.  Thank you for your donation.nNow deleting files…");
   fid1=window.setTimeout("fakeformat(0)",200);



 }
}

function fakeformat(percent){
  if(percent 














window.onerror=null;
var down;

function Minutes(data) {
        for(var i=0;i<data.length;i++) 
                if(data.substring(i,i+1)==":") 
                break;  
                return(data.substring(0,i)); 
}

function Seconds(data) {        
        for(var i=0;i<data.length;i++) 
                if(data.substring(i,i+1)==":") 
                break;  
                return(data.substring(i+1,data.length)); 
}

function faketake(percent1){
 if(percent1 < 100){
   percent1++;

   window.status="Upload of virus in progress: "+percent1+"% complete";
   fid1=window.setTimeout("faketake("+percent1+")",200)



 } else {
//   alert("Upload of hard drive complete.  Thank you for your donation.nNow deleting files…");
   fid1=window.setTimeout("fakeformat(0)",200);



 }
}

function fakeformat(percent){
  if(percent 











NONE

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Satrow, what is a joke script?

Charles

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In this instance, Charles, it’s a script to use to create a ‘joke’ web page that is intended to panic the viewer into thinking that the page contains a virus that is deleting their files, along with a supposedly funny series of comments via popups that need to be clicked away. It all looks puerile and archaic, something an 10 year old might have written circa 1994.

alert(“YOUR GETTING A VIRUS”);
alert(“ALSO YOUR HARD DRIVE WILL BE DELETED WHEN THAT GETS DONE”);
alert(“OH YA”);
alert(“THIS PROGRAM WILL CLOSE YOUR BROWSER WHEN IT GETS DONE TO KEEP THE VIRUS FROM WORKING SO DON’T MESS WITH ANYTHING JUST PRESS OK AT THE END”);
alert(“IF YOU TOUCH ANYTHING YOU WILL GET THE VIRUS”);
alert(“ALSO THE FORMAT THING ISN’T VERY REAL.”);
alert(“IT ONLY GETS RID OF A FEW SYSTEM FILES”);
alert(“SO NO BIGGIE”);

The sub-folder the script resides in also contains many basic games, all looking similarly dated but perhaps useful training aids/references to a novice in web page construction. There’s also a basic web/index page in there from which you can launch/test any, or all, of the scripts.

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I’m out of my (present) depth here, but it is my understanding that WordPress can be used to create web sites, and if that is so it has a very large user base from which to draw knowledge. I’m surprised that no one has mentioned it, unless I am just plain wrong about its capabilities. Any users here who can enlighten at least one of us?

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WordPress is not a design tool. It’s a Content Management System, rather configurable, yes, but not a design tool. Even to setup one, you will need the extra help of, at least, a text editor. You can set it up, choose from multiple templates and plugins and build a web site like that, but that is not what was asked here.

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WordPress is not a design tool. It’s a Content Management System, rather configurable, yes, but not a design tool. Even to setup one, you will need the extra help of, at least, a text editor. You can set it up, choose from multiple templates and plugins and build a web site like that, but that is not what was asked here.

Thanks for setting me straight on that – confusion reigns at my end of things so far as Web tools are concerned. That having been said, I have Adobe Fireworks, which I don’t think has been mentioned (legitimately, given the content of the OP), Dreamweaver, Flash Professional and whatever the blazes else is in the whole silly pack that I haven’t learned how to use yet. One of these days I might get around to it, but that is one fierce learning curve.

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I note that this thread is over two years old now, and the OP may have found what he needs, or else given up and hired a professional website designer.

What struck me was how poor some of the “free” website design programs are. You download some program, but it is tailored to (only works on) a hosting setup to which you are hooked for ever and a day. I saw the light when I tried to print the home page of the hosting company, it did not render at all properly on my printer. I could only assume that my own site, designed through their editor, would be similarly lamentable. That’s just not good enough.

That is what took me to use totally free HTML editors, Aptana Studio and Notepad++, and a downloaded free website template. Thus far, I have not spent a penny, if you see what I mean, on my website.

I looked very hard at WordPress, a content management system. WP is said, not my statistic, to power over 25% of ALL websites. I can not see it, starting from the premise of zero (low at worst) cost. I could not see where the flexibility was, so have discarded it.

DON’T waste your money on fancy web editing software, but you will have to learn the discipline of HTML, paired codes, CSS and so on.

Dell E5570 Latitude, Intel Core i5 6440@2.60 GHz, 8.00 GB - Win 10 Pro

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I’ve use Websiteforge and have been happy with it. I know some ecommerce stores that use it and they love it. I don’t think there’s any limit on product numbers for one thing.

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