Good Website Editing Software for the Casual Internet User?

Question

I'm going to be coaching a gentleman, older, and fairly Internet inexperienced, with maintaining a simple web site. Nothing dynamic, just static pages, text, links, and images. I haven't done any web page work for years. What would you guys recommend he [we] use for software? Are there online tools we can share that would give him the ability to do basic editing, but allow me to get in and fix any HTML "glitches" that might come up?

Answer 1

There are quite a lot free HTML editors out there, like KompoZer or SeaMonkey. You can also use Visual Web Developer Express, although that one is more programming-oriented. There's a more extensive list of HTML editors on the Wikipedia.

As for sharing, you can set quick and dirty replication of the sources using FolderShare.

There are online HTML editing tools, but all I know of are tied to the hosting service. For example, you can take a look at Google pages, which offers online editing, but publishes only on the Google service. I am not aware of any online HTML editors that allow saving to the local disk or publishing to third-party FTP site.

Answer 2

You mentioned that you haven't done any web page work for years. Not sure how many year that is, but I think the current trend is to go dynamic even for simpler websites to avoid the burden of page authors to learn HTML. I would suggest setting up something like a Wiki system, where your client can type in the content, and you can edit the formatting glitches. You can pick a system in a language that you are comfortable with.

If you really want to go for static HTML, I only know SeaMonkey, because that's what Netscape Communicator used to be. As Franci pointed out, there's a list on Wikipedia.

Answer 3

Why not set him up with a wordpress blog? The interface is fairly straightforward, his friends can comment on what he writes, he can upload pictures etc., it pretty much serves as a customisable web site without needing any tools at all and not having the ugly ftp issue of updating the site (put yourself in the shoes of a non-techy for a while and you'll see how awful the whole experience is).

If you want to go one step further, make yourself look a technical genius and him web-savvy, register a domain name for him and forward it to his blog. He will then be able to tell people he is at mydomain.com rather than someoneelse.com/crypticurl/weirdpage.html.

Also look at facebook and myspace pages. You may find you can get what he wants from those.

Answer 4

Perhaps roxer might work? You wouldn't be able to "fix glitches" afaik, but the whole idea is pretty simple and newbie-friendly.

If not, and if wikis, wordpress (and other CMSs) and similar aren't quite what you were looking for and if paying for software feasible, there's programs like iWeb for Mac OS X (together with MobileMe a fairly braindead simple solution) and Microsoft Expression Web.

Answer 5

I've tried both approaches:

• HTML Editor: Kompozer for teaching my sister to update her site.
• CMS: CMSimple for teaching my mom to update her site.

Both approaches worked, they both could update their sites. But I had to intervene more often with my sister because she would occasionally break things in the page and restoring the old content was tricky (I set up a script eventually to do regular backups of the server content).

My advise would be to use a CMS. You'll spend more time setting it up once, but the site maintenance afterwards will require less involvement from your part.

Answer 6

Have you considered using Live Writer?