WYSIWYG HTML Editors - Making Webpages Easy

See 5-minute Video to see how easy NVu is to use. Click to View Video

Wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) is a program that makes creating a webpage like creating a Word processing document. It is an interpreter, of sorts, that tries to make the process easier for the user. It tries to allow you to, for instance, add an image or table by using a command like Insert, Table.

If you use a Word processor of any type you will be more comfortable with a wysiwyg HTML editor than trying to learn HTML code and using it in a plain text editor. You will also get the job done quicker.

You can use Microsoft Word to save a Word document as an HTML webpage by choosing it from the save as dialog box. Then upload it using an FTP (file transfer protocol) program. My favorite is available in a free for personal use from http://smartftp.com

Note: While I mention using Word if you are just beginning to create web pages, I recommend that you quickly move to a wysiwyg html editor.

Most of the wysiwyg editors also built-in FTP programs to upload your pages to your webserver at your host. You just choose File, Save from the menu bar and give it your domain name, user name and password.

The NEW Start from NVu to an editor thats going to be even better - still FREE.

KompoZer is taking over where NVu left off. NVu has stopped their development and KompoZer is moving forward from where they left off. You can get KompoZer for free at: http://www.kompozer.net/

Get Microsoft FrontPage©  Online Training Free.     

My Favorite WYSIWYG HTML editor is Microsoft FrontPage 2003.

Here’s a link to HOURS of  Free, online training on the new Microsoft Office 2003.  Go to the link below, look for Browse Training Courses

http://officebeta.microsoft.com/training/

Look at this one and you might get a feel for how it will be to:

Create a FrontPage Web site – (50 minutes)

Get a  30-day Trial copy Free. Pay $7.95 Shipping and handling.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/frontpage/prodinfo/trial.mspx

The retail version goes for $199 or $99 for the Upgrade version. You can probably get it for around $75 on Ebay.com.  I believe it’s worth the money if you are doing quite a bit with websites. It keeps up with page name changes and whether they will cause broken links, it will publish and entire site at once. It knows what files such as images should also be uploaded and makes it easy to do. Just too many things to remember.

NVU - pronounced "in view" is a wysiwyg editor.

To get started on a smaller budget, this a new one that I have found NVU which is an open source program (free) that you can get at   http://nvu.com/download.html 

It has a built ftp program (Site Manager) that lets you upload the web pages to your webserver.

You won't need to know much html code at all using wysiwyg. NVu has extensive help built right into the program. This is just too good to be free! Get it before they start selling it.

See 5-minute Video to see how easy NVu is to use. Click to View Video

My Favorite free-standing FTP Program

if you have trouble with the built-in FTP in NVu, just use SmartFTP mentioned above to do the uploading. http://smartftp.com

Once you choose an editor to try out, create a folder on your desktop to save the pages to. The homepage should be named index.html, since the file with that name will be the one that is loaded first for a visitor to your site.

Create a second page and give it a different name, say, page2.html, save it in the same folder with index.html. Then open index.html again and place a hyperlink on it to link to the second page. You can then try it on your own computer. Just open the folder, double-click on the index.html file and it should open in your browser.

Then click on the link to your second page and the browser should load it for you. Continue making other pages and adding additional links on your index.html to them. Each of those could have a link back to your index.htm.

By following this process, you will have created a website on your desktop. The only thing needed to make it a real website would be to upload all the pages to a webserver.

You can get your own space on a webserver to do that and try it for free for 30 days at:

http://dollarware-hosting.com/trial/ 

How to get a Web Site hosted

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