PC equivalent to iWeb

On 5-Feb-2008, at 07:00, gidi wrote:
> My brother, bless him, still swears by the dark side. His wife needs
> to design a quick and easy web site, which also needs to be fairly
> elegant.

I think you need to have your Sister In Law over for a couple of hours.

Unfortunately, she lives some 3000 kms away.

As for the subtext: do you mean to imply that there is no such thing?

Gidi

On Feb 5, 2008 9:00 AM, gidi <gs.pubwanadoo.fr> wrote:
> My brother, bless him, still swears by the dark side. His wife needs to design a quick and easy web site, which also needs to be fairly elegant.
>
> Does any of you know a Windows equivalent to iWeb (or, at a pinch, to RapidWeaver)?

Exactly what type of website is she designing? Is it a blog, for a
business, or for an organization? How technical is she?

A lot of ISPs have various web templates that can be used to produce a
nice looking website and rather quickly too. If she is getting her
website from someone like GoDaddy, she can try out their website
creation tools.

Or, she can try Google Page Creator: http://pages.google.com for free.

If she is interested in a "blog type" website, she can try several
sites that will help her setup a blog and make it look nice and
pretty. Blogs aren't just for blathering either. Blogs can be used for
news sites for organizations, for hobbyist pages, etc.

If she needs something a bit more complex, and she is technical
enough, she can try Joomla or Content Management Made Simple. A bit
trickier to setup, but once it is setup, it is very easy to keep up to
date.

--
David Weintraub
qazwartgmail.com

On 7-Feb-2008, at 17:30, gidi wrote:
> Unfortunately, she lives some 3000 kms away.

So, she can do that in 2 days driving if she pushes it. :)

> As for the subtext: do you mean to imply that there is no such thing?

Not that I've seen.

On Feb 8, 2008, at 4:01 AM, LewisGmail wrote:

> On 7-Feb-2008, at 17:30, gidi wrote:
>>
>> As for the subtext: do you mean to imply that there is no such thing?
>
> Not that I've seen.

Depending on what abilities of iWeb are needed, Mozilla's SeaMonkey is
a possibility. So is Microsoft Live Writer.

Note that I haven't used iWeb, SeaMonkey, or Writer.

   --John

Live Writer, from my brief look at their site, is a blogging tool. My sis-in-law needs a general purpose tool - she volunteered to do the site of an association she's a member of. The site will probably be hosted, at least for a while, on a server in a university, so not much in the way of pre-cooked tools or templates there. And no, she is not very technical, hence the need for something iWeb-like.

It's beginning to look as if such a thing does not exist in the Windows world.

Thanks to all for their suggestions.

Gidi

Op 12-feb-08, om 07:55 heeft gidi het volgende geschreven:

> university, so not much in the way of pre-cooked tools or templates
> there. And no, she is not very technical, hence the need for
> something iWeb-like.
>
> It's beginning to look as if such a thing does not exist in the
> Windows world.

www.nvu.com ??
--
Adrien

Would Nvu or Kompozer work? (www.kompozer.net)

Also, what about Microsoft's FrontPage? I thought that was Microsoft's sort-of iWeb...

-Jon

Nvu/Kompozer requires some technical knowledge. In fact, my experience with it points to having to know HTML. In addition, it is somewhat buggy, and development has stopped in, I believe, 2005. (Yes, even Kompozer, though it claims to fix Nvu's bugs, is still far from stable.)

iWeb, on the other hand, allows building a fairly sophisticated site without *any* technical background. Is FrontPage similar? Don't know. Will report if it is ever chosen as the winning app in this contest.

Thanks again,

Gidi

I have had experience with FrontPage and I would not recommend it. Microsoft is no longer developing it. They now have a new program named Expression Web, which I have used on one site. It is a much better program than FrontPage, but it suffers from being a first version. Neither are anywhere near as easy to use as iWeb.

Kathy

I use an old version of Adobe GoLive for my web work. I usually do it on my Mac but I have Golive 6 installed on my PC as well, just in case my Mac is out of action and I have to update my site. GoLive needs a bit of learning but I have always found it pretty intuitive... and the grid makes it easy to darg and drop images and textboxes around and place them where they look best. I know the tachies hate Golive because it writes inelegant code, but for us mere mortals who just want to get something up and running, it works just fine.

Paul

> I use an old version of Adobe GoLive for my web work. I usually do it on my
> Mac but I have Golive 6 installed on my PC as well, just in case my Mac is out
> of action and I have to update my site. GoLive needs a bit of learning but I
> have always found it pretty intuitive... and the grid makes it easy to darg
> and drop images and textboxes around and place them where they look best. I
> know the tachies hate Golive because it writes inelegant code, but for us mere
> mortals who just want to get something up and running, it works just fine.

I'll second that. I learned web design using GoLive, and while it's never
been my favourite programme, I could make things happen with it. At the very
least, it felt Adoby ‹ it definitely fit in with the rest of the Creative
Suite.

But now it's been orphaned. I tried the download of a free trial copy of v9,
but was not very impressed. It felt very incomplete; it was rather buggy
(even more so than earlier releases) and just didn't quite work. It's
clearly been left in a corner while Adobe wait for it to die quietly.

In the meantime I've switched to DreamWeaver, the only web-design programme
with a cheesier name than GoLive. As I work through my copy of the Missing
Manual (top books, by the way), I'm struck by how powerful DW appears to be.
But it's not an Adobe programme ‹ not really, not yet. The interface is
still very non-CS, and it feels like Quark to GoLive's InDesign ‹ sure, it
does whatever you need it to do, but in a rather inelegant way.

Steve

On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 3:55 AM, Big Steve <bigstevemactampabay.rr.com> wrote:
> In the meantime I've switched to DreamWeaver, the only web-design programme
> with a cheesier name than GoLive. As I work through my copy of the Missing
> Manual (top books, by the way), I'm struck by how powerful DW appears to be.

Years ago, there was a Web design program called Claris Home Page. (I
think that was the name but I cannot swear to it.)

It was very simple to use. Unfortunately, it disappeared into thin air
and we never heard about it again.

So I switched to DreamWeaver but could never get the hang of it. I am
a programmer by profession and thought I had normal amount of
intelligence. But DW made me feel stupid. It was just too complicated
for me. It had too many things it it that I did not need or
understand.

iWeb is a no brainer. It lets you put a Web page together in just a
matter of minutes. Of course, you cannot do anything fancy with it
like DW can. But unless you are running a business, if you just want a
simple Web site where your friends and relatives can visit, iWeb works
perfectly.

--
____________________
Ryoichi Morita
Coarsegold, CA
http://www.rjmorita.com

 I also tried using version 9 of GoLive and was really disappointed with it. It was incredibly buggy. I have an old copy of GoLive 6 on my Mac but, alas, I have lost the original install disk for it. I just keep my fingers crossed that the app will keep functioning because I don't like Dreamweaver, and Adobe has obviously discarded the GoLive line.

If anyone has a good copy of GoLive 6 or 7 (for the Mac) for sale, please get in touch! LOL

Paul

---

Sell your car for just $30 at CarPoint.com.au. It's simple!

How about using a hosted site such as Weebly that lets users create template-based websites for free? It is naturally cross platform (though I believe that the site requires Firefox for Mac users). <http://www.weebly.com>