March 30, 2005

Curious George: Web Design for Mac OSX I'm trying to find a reeeeally simple web design program for OSX. I got Dreamweaver, but find the learning curve a little steep and don't really have the time to put into it. I need a simple wysiwyg program that will let me construct a simple site in just a few days...any suggestions?
posted by sexyrobot 19 years ago
  • did you put Dreamweaver in design mode? (should be a little tab up top) I use it as a profesional developer, but it can be totally WYSIWYG if you want it to be. You can just do "insert table" and things like that from the top menu, and you never have to type a line of code or even look at code...
  • Honestly, Dreamweaver is pretty cut & dry. Spend a bit looking through it, and you'll see that you can create a simple website in a couple of hours. One tip: Modify -> Page Properties for bg, text color, etc. Another tip: Tables are good.
  • Doh! And what drjimmy11 said :o)
  • Dreamweaver is it, man. Other than that, maybe skEdit, but it doesn't have the visual design capability that Dreamweaver has. Your only other option is handcoding. Avoid GoLive like the plague.
  • You might want to have a look at its sibling Contribute if you are still feeling overwhelmed.
  • Nvu is pretty class, nice and simple. But honestly, as people above have said, Dreamweaver is the best. Give it a blast though.
  • What are you wanting to do this for? If it's a personal site, I suggest using a .Mac site and using their templates. I do that for managing game-related gallery stuff, and I use Dreamweaver for most of my needs. I'm assuming money's not an issue if you bought Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is good for heavy-duty sites and has the best project-management tools I've ever seen, but it can be overkill for simple projects. And there are places where you really do need HTML knowledge to make things go, depending on what you get up to. However, for WSYWIG, it's probably as good as you're going to get. Most of the simpler editors I know of require you to know HTML. /tech writer who has written HTML online help and done a number of web sites.
  • I've used both NVU and Dreamweaver and in design mode they aren't any harder than a word processor (and actually most modern word processors will export to html, but the code is horribly bad). Honestly though, the best thing I did was just find sites I like and viewed the source to try to figure it out. I've learned much more by using notepad (or textedit) and just trying it and seeing what happens. Since you have Dreamweaver, find a site you like, save it to disk and open it in dreamweaver where you can tweak it to make it look like you want it to.
  • You could try the mozilla web editor. I used to use that. It's pretty simple.
  • The really cool part about Dreamweaver is that it helps you learn to code. Put it in "split" mode, and, for example, click "insert table with 2 rows and 3 columns." You'll see the code appear for the table in the code window. It's a great hands-on way to learn.
  • arg...ok, i'll try it again...i just need pictures, backgrounds, and links, basically...i used to have this program for os9 (freeway web page 6.0) that worked great and was super easy, but for some reason i'm having trouble uploading pages to my .mac account...as far as using an online web tool (like .mac homepage for example), i CANNOT have some dumbass 'this page was created using blahblahblah' on it (this is for my portfolio)...my main problem with dreamweaver is all the options it has...too much clutter...it's a, like, i don't need photoshop if i'm just resizing my pictures kind of deal....thanks for the advice though...
  • Avoid GoLive like the plague. Really? I do some pretty limited stuff. Can you tell me why I should avoid GoLive? I've been using it assuming that Adobe does everything best? sorry-don't mean to hijack
  • kamus: To my knowledge, GoLive is nowhere near as extendable as Dreamweaver (not really an issue for simple stuff) nor as efficient in code production. It doesn't have the management tools, either. You'll more than likely have an easier time finding help using Dreamweaver than GoLive, as well.
  • ActuallySettle: NVU is the updated version of the mozilla editor. The Linspire people have taken over primary developement of it, but it is still available for multiple operating systems (as well as the source code).
  • If all you need are pictures, backgrounds, and links it would be easier to learn the HTML than Dreamweaver (although Dreamweaver is a great WYSIWYG program if you ignore a lot of the features--just like Word is a great word processing program if you ignore a lot of the features.
  • C'mon, when you've got GeoCities, who needs web design software!