Teaching a layperson to write a website

Question

Background. An intelligent marine ecologist student would like help with her University-hosted project website.

Proposed Solution. I installed an open source website authoring tool (Amaya) on her Windows-based laptop and began to teach her to craft websites.

Result. Amaya is too complicated, too buggy. CSS and HTML are too complicated and time consuming to learn.

Discussion. If it were my site, I would use server-side includes for common items (header, footer, and menu). I would use CSS exclusively for the look and feel, and XHTML for the content. This is out of the question for her. It is a simple site (8 pages) and I want her to be able to edit, and publish, the content on her own, as I do not have time to take on yet another project.

Revised Solution. Drop CSS, use a table-based layout, and create pages using copy of a template HTML file.

Update #1: She does not want advertising, and has a host in place through the University. She does not want a blog.

Update #2: I have no control over the hosting servers.

Update #3: I have since created the template. Thanks for all the ideas, folks, but nothing looks like a good fit.

What other solutions would you propose?

Answer 1

The obvious answer is to let them edit a reduced subset of information.

The typical solution here is a CMS, of varying degrees of complexity and success.

Generally, most 'regular' people consider a blog a 'website', so you can solve this by directing them to WordPress, or Tumblr, or some similar thing that lets them post structured data.

Answer 2

Use a blog hosting service or something like Google Sites?

Answer 3

Point her to somewhere like Squarespace?

Answer 4

I'd use Drupal.

Answer 5

One should be able to learn css and html in a day. It s pretty straight forward.

Revised solution is fine, but using cascading tables would be cumbersome depending on the design of the website, and in any case, you would need some styles here there.

I would recommend dreamveawer, which has a gui and there is trial version out there.

Answer 6

I think you need to decide whether the layperson is trying to publish content in a web format, or whether they are trying to learn the basics of actually building the web content. If this person struggles with even basic HTML and CSS I would use a simple CMS like WordPress. That way you can setup templates and they only have to deal with blocks of content in the page.

Personally I would keep the CSS-based layout as that reduces the code clutter somewhat. If the person becomes more confident with HTML it may be easier to dive into.

Answer 7

In a University environment, it is hard to find anyone who is not at least familiar with Microsoft Office. Because of that, I'd suggest using Publisher as a wysiwyg editor. If the student is then interested learning the coding behind it, then Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft Frontpage. Both should be readily available by the University.

There are also many other wysiwyg editors that make the job really easy, and you can still help the student with the code if he/she is interested. Code just might be a little messy...

Answer 8

XStandard Lite is a free WYSIWYG editor (I haven't tried it).

Alternatively if she doesn't want to spend money on a tool then perhaps she needs to spend time (to learn to code html using Notepad ... it's not that hard ... there are many non-programmers who do it ... journalists, for example).

Answer 9

Along with some of the other suggestions, why not provide her with a tool that does all the underlying work for her? Google Sites works out pretty well. It's easy to use. Makes fairly decent sites.

Answer 10

If she has a mac I'd say iWeb, it's amazing what my friends can cook up with that.

But my guess is she's only got the laptop you mentioned.