Best WYSIWYG (Visual) Editor for Website creation and management? Help.

[jungleexplorer]

Okay, I have to confess here that I am a FrontPage loyalist. Back in the day I spent time and money to go to technical collage to get FP certified. Then a few years later, Microsoft abandone FP. That really chapped me. Of course, I continued to use FP as long as possible, but as support for many of it's primary feature disappeared, I have had to look for other programs.

Unfortunately, I have not found any program that can even come close to the simplicity of FP. Sure there are programs out their that allow you to create a web page, but I am not talking about creating a web page. I am taking about a WEB SITE creator. Creating a web site is many times more complicated then creating a single web page. First off, a website needs a navigational structure so that people can move between the pages. To create a navigational structure from scratch is difficult and time consuming if you have a site with many pages that are several levels deep. But beyond just creating the navigation, you need a program that can automatically adjust the whole structure, if you make a change to any part of it. If the program cannot do this automatically, then you are forced to go back and independently edit every single aspect of the change manually. This is why you need, not only an editor, but a manager. FP did all this for you, so that if you renamed a page that was three levels deep in 30 page website, FP would go through and adjust every effected navigation bar to reflect the name change.

Another thing that FP offered that I have not found in any other program is a large database of graphics themes. Themes are a real time save. Most program I have tested have none or very few basic themes. Without themes a person has to be expert at graphics creation and spend a lot of time to just get their site looking good.

I said all this to give you some idea of what I am looking for. I am looking for a Website creation and management program, and not simply a web page editor. It does not have to be as fancy as FP, but it needs to have (at minimum) the time saving feature listed above. It has to be a Window PC program that is up-to-date with the latest coding. It must offer visual editing. If I wanted to edit html code manually, I would just use Notepad.

I realize that Microsoft offers Expression Web, but they have abandoned it in the same way they did with FP. I am tired of MS creating a program and getting people use to it to only abandon it, leaving them hanging.

Thanks for the help guys.

 

[thor220]

WYSIWYG's are still around but have mostly moved online. WYSIWYG is targeted at people with little to no coding experience, the average person usually. Things have gotten more and more mobile and thus so have the products targeted at those people. Pros can still get their fix on Dreamweaver.

If your just looking for something simple it's better that you just look for a website builder that's online. They are designed to be easy to use, come with support, and provide additional features like setting up your domain and server for you. Chances are, most people who don't know how to code aren't going to understand these things.

 

[getochkn]

Built in navigation structures, applied themes, are all things of the 90's. Now most websites are dynamic and generated on the fly.

Things like menus can be created on the fly with DHTML, XML, Javascript, CSS, etc. This way one file controls all the menu items and each page just needs an <include script "menu.js"> type of command and it's all done. In FP, if you edited a menu item, it would automatically edit each HTML page to makes the changes. Not efficient and not how the web works nowadays. This also results in way extra code as each page has the full menu in it. 1 file, 1 edit, less code.

As for themes, ugg. Making a website off a theme so it looks like everyone else's website that uses that theme, again, no one does that anymore. Tables aren't even used anymore in new 5.0 HTML specs, it's all DIV's and other elements.

 

[getochkn]

If you want something similar, then look into CMS, content management systems, like Joomla, etc. They are all managed online, pages created on the fly, follow all the latest web rules, get themes that are easy to change, a menu edit, that lets you make menu changes that are reflected on all pages, yet control it all from one file, so kind of best of both worlds.