Web Building Tools for beginners

Originally Posted by ratchetjaw

SDF



Any plaintext editor other than Windows Notepad
Firefox
HTML for Dummies

That's right. Coding and debugging by hand, with the keyboard. Past generations of Web "developers" built entire sites that way and you can too. You learn it by doing it, not by selecting icons in some mousebound automated HTML editor. The only thing that teaches you how to do is move stuff around on a screen.

Wordpress is probably the biggest piece of insecure, barely alpha-grade S that still is not ready to have even seen a public release. Why it's in such wide use is beyond my level of comprehension. Don't spread the disease! Avoid it at all cost!

Because it's easy and has a ton of features and add ons.

It's also pretty secure provided the user takes basic measures. As for "barely alpha-grade" that must be why it's so insanely popular and is used by tons of big businesses, universities, etc.

Whatever some inexperienced person (or heck, even an experienced one) codes by hand is very likely to wind up with a ton of security holes and truly be "barely alpha grade." Writing a secure, featureful CMS is actually a fairly complicated thing to do, which is why people take pre-built solutions and customize. Wordpress has the good fortune of a lively community and gets kept up to date and patched whenever issues do arise.

[thecoalman]

Originally Posted by eGeekUniverse

Some inexpensive hosting companies with drag and drop site builders included:
iPage.com
fatcow.com
godaddy.com
+ Many more.

Those site builders are usually proprietary and you should avoid them like the plague. If you ever want to move your site to another host you basically have to start from scratch. If you are using Drupal, Wordpress or something like that you can easily move it to any host.

I just moved one recently from Networks Solutions and frankly it was a nightmare. This was a small non-profit youth sports organization. FTP access did give you access to the html pages and the resized images however these would no longer be editable if moved to another host. I'd assume the templates were copyrighted without a license to use on another host so you probably couldn't use them even in that limited capacity anyway (not that I was going to use them).

The biggest issue was the hundreds of images that were uploaded over a decade using a web based interface. Nobody had any copies of these, there was no FTP access and they all sat behind this web based interface that was basically a image gallery. There was no way to select multiple files so for each image I had to select the thumb, wait for the page to load, right click the full image, select save, back button and select the next image. What would be a few clicks with FTP and perhaps 10 minutes to download turned into a 2 day adventure in how to produce carpal tunnel syndrome.

[MyScreenName]

Anyone have any feedback on Weebly? I'm considering buying a subscription for their site builder.

[thecoalman]

I can't specifically comment on that service but a quick search says they allow you to export the site if you want to move it to another host. Most likely it's proprietary backend and you going to lose the web interface for editing and changing it.

If it's only a few pages that is not necessarily a bad thing because you can always update or edit with an HTML editor. If it's a larger site management of all those pages is going to be very difficult and there may be "gotcha's" like the one I mentioned above with the source images.

Something like Drupal or Worpress is going to much more difficult to learn but in the long run it will pay off.


If you want to play around with something like Drupal install XAMPP first on your home computer and then you can install Drupal for testing purposes.

[Shutout]

Wordpress isn't going anywhere anytime soon and you can move from host to host and pretty much do anything you can think of with the plugins people offer. No coding necessary, maybe just minor tweaks to get things perfect. Quick and easy.

[thecoalman]

Originally Posted by Shutout

Wordpress isn't going anywhere anytime soon .....

Even if it did go away there is usually some type of migration path. A CMS migration from something like Wordpress to Drupal is going to be fairly complicated but for dedicated software like a forum conversion there is usually a straight forward process as long as the different systems are widely used. .