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Best Easy true WYSIWYG Web Builder 2011

netdog

netdog

macrumors 603
Original poster
Feb 6, 2006
5,760
38
London
I tried to get by with iWeb despite the fact that it came up rendering differently (and sometimes unacceptably) on different browsers. It was quite good enough or powerful enough, but it came very close and was very easy to I used it.

Now that iWeb is orphaned, I don't dare keep using it and am looking for an easy Web creation program, hopefully that's better than iWeb and also allows me to start with a blank page rather than forcing me into one of their pre-existing templates.

While back in the days of HTML 1 and 2, I used to write pages with a text editor, I have no interest in now learning CSS and HTML5, but want a program that will do it for me.

Thanks to all!
 
Try Adobe Muse. It's new and still in beta, kind of a hybrid of Dreamweaver, Photoshop and InDesign/Illustrator. I've been using it and am liking it, and while I haven't yet published anything as a site yet, the HTML files it exports look good.
http://muse.adobe.com/
 
I'm in this hunt too - here's the net of what I've found:

Sandvox - way too dumbed down (can't even set page widith).
RapidWeaver - not WYSIWYG (editing is separate from layout).
Muse - great editor, can't publish anywhere but Adobe (and that darn subscription model is $$$$$)
Freeway Pro/Express - WYSIWYG but not free layout (i.e. can't put an image where you want it) - still requires knowledge of HTML.
Dreamweaver - heavy duty, but not free layout.
Flux - Dreamweaver done right.

In other words, there's no decent iWeb replacement out there right now - to do that it needs to be:

1) Able to publish to any server
2) True WYSIWYG
3) Able to do basic site formatting (like page width) without hand-editing CSS
4) Able to do drag/drop placement of images and text without futzing with tables, etc (i.e. free layout).
 
lhotka said:
Muse - great editor, can't publish anywhere but Adobe (and that darn subscription model is $$$$$)
Click to expand...

Not entirely true. In muse, go to File -> Export as HTML. Then you can use an FTP client like Filezilla to upload to your host server
 
Thanks - I didn't think of such a manual approach, but the lack of a true publish function (with delta updates instead of a complete reload) is an issue. Hopefully Adobe will resolve that in the final release.

And rethink the subscription model - there should be a bigger discount if you buy it for a year at once.
 
lhotka said:
Thanks - I didn't think of such a manual approach, but the lack of a true publish function (with delta updates instead of a complete reload) is an issue. Hopefully Adobe will resolve that in the final release.

And rethink the subscription model - there should be a bigger discount if you buy it for a year at once.
Click to expand...

Interestingly, Muse use to have the ability to save only the delta changes, but in a recent update they took that functionality out; now "Export as HTML" resaves the entire site every time. And, I agree about the subscription pricing - definitely a huge turn off. Not sure what I'm going to do once Muse exits beta and starts costing money.
 
Adobe Edge

Try adobe edge.
It's totally wysiwyg and it's easy and there's plenty of tutorials on youtube to get started. It export to html5 and looks great on all browsers.
Like muse it's in beta/preview stage but still runs great and you can do amazing animation with it. Checkout my site all done in edge.
http://gerry.rufman.com
 
anubis said:
Interestingly, Muse use to have the ability to save only the delta changes, but in a recent update they took that functionality out; now "Export as HTML" resaves the entire site every time. And, I agree about the subscription pricing - definitely a huge turn off. Not sure what I'm going to do once Muse exits beta and starts costing money.
Click to expand...

I'll probably bite the bullet and do it, but since I don't update the site all the time, I may go the month-by-month route.

Adobe appears to be making it a policy to annoy customers (e.g. their 'must be on 5 to get 6 upgrade policy). Someone over there is feeling the revenue crunch from flash's impending demise.
 
And resurrecting my old thread - I've been using Muse - I bit the bullet on the subscription for a while, but the whole Creative Cloud thing brought it up again. That and I'm getting sick and tired of having to have Air installed on my machine.

Any advancements in the past 18 months out there?
 
With semantic markup becoming increasingly important, it seems that companies are pushing WYSIWYG web interfaces less and less. I am seeing fewer companies invest in this space... Semantic markup cannot be done by a machine... it is a human process, like editing, that computers can't really mimic accurately unless you have a lot of control over how the content is structured when it is input (like in a CMS)

We had a client pass us a project done in Muse, and the code was so poorly formatted we had to rebuild most of it when we went to tie it to live data... so it would up being a lot more expensive than doing it right the first time.
 
lucidmedia said:
With semantic markup becoming increasingly important, it seems that companies are pushing WYSIWYG web interfaces less and less. I am seeing fewer companies invest in this space... Semantic markup cannot be done by a machine... it is a human process, like editing, that computers can't really mimic accurately unless you have a lot of control over how the content is structured when it is input (like in a CMS)

We had a client pass us a project done in Muse, and the code was so poorly formatted we had to rebuild most of it when we went to tie it to live data... so it would up being a lot more expensive than doing it right the first time.
Click to expand...

We don't need/want semantic markup - just static web pages (no link to active data at all). No need/desire to edit the HTML directly (just need it to work on the usual collection of browsers). Mobile is nice, but not necessary. In other words, I need folks to be able to add content (particularly new galleries and pages) without having to write code.
 
Squarespace is pretty awesome. Check it out. Also, there're sites like Wix and others. See this post: http://line25.com/articles/which-hosted-cms-website-builder-is-right-for-you
Any of these is going to be better than a native software solution.

With the money you're thinking about spending on software that maybe looks okay, but actually puts the code out wrong, you could just hire a web designer to make your site. There's no such thing as a WYSIWYG website builder that actually does it right.

Disclaimer: I'm a freelance web designer.
 
Unfortunately, we can't use a hosted builder.

It costs a *lot* more than a couple hundred bucks to have a site built - and then there's the ongoing updates and changes, which add up to far more than a software package.

But thanks for the idea!
 
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