Quick software recommendation – Windows web building?

Anyone know of a cheap PC web design package that’s roughly equivalent to iWeb, Rapidweaver or the like? Something that builds (nice) standards-compliant sites that’ll behave in Firefox, comes with a fully functional tryout and is particularly good for beginners?

I’ve been asked for a recommendation but I haven’t covered PC web stuff for a wee while now, and I think the last one I looked at was Serif’s WebPlus. It’s amazing how quickly you can lose touch with the market when you’re not covering it from month to month.


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0 responses to “Quick software recommendation – Windows web building?”

  1. Gary

    Yeah, I thought of that. But it’s more desktop software I need to recommend.

  2. A package which is cheap, functional, desktop-based and makes compliant code? Now that’s funny :-)

    Many of the cheap PC desktop web “easy site” builders lock you into a contract or even keep your domain name, and a few will make you pay an “upgrade surcharge” to do things as trivial as upload your own graphics. You get what you pay for.

  3. Well, I suppose desktop software is better when you have no connection to the Internet. Although that might be a problem for developing websites whatever you use, come to think of it…

    Put it this way: “There’s this great web software called iWeb! It’s actually free, and it’s so good it needs a super-advanced computer to run it! The computer? Only a few hundred quid!”

  4. Gary

    Sorry heather, the anti-spam thing trapped you by mistake.

    Yeah, it’s a pretty patchy market – seems as if all the good stuff’s on the mac these days. Maybe PC users don’t want to make websites :)

  5. Gary

    I suppose desktop software is better when you have no connection to the Internet.

    Or when your ISP’s playing funny buggers.

  6. Since when do you need a Net connection to design a website?

  7. Grosie

    You could always do what I do and code it by hand using something like word-pad and test the pages using Apache.

    Or, I have heard that dreamweaver is quite good.

  8. Since when do you need a Net connection to design a website?

    How else are you going to get your design “inspiration”, copy bits of code from cool-looking sites, RTFM for CSS hacks, Google for pics, download stock pics (after Google comes up empty handed), and finally, check it works on a real web server on the real internet, not served from your hard drive?

  9. Fair enough. Not the way I work at all, but I can see why you might need a Net connection.

    > and finally, check it works on a real web server on the real internet

    Well, obviously, yes, but that’s not design; that’s testing. Maybe I’ve been working in IT for too long that that seems to me like an important distinction rather than a quibble. I’m sure, once upon a time, it wouldn’t have.

  10. Ok, I was kinda conflating the whole design/code/test thing into one, probably because, being one person, I can sort of do all three, in a kind of rolling iterative process. But of course you can design with a sheet of paper and a pencil. And some of my best designs have been done that way. But others were just “ooh, that’s interesting, how do you get a shadow like that? Hmmm…” Peek at the code, play with Photoshop, and evolve something.

  11. Should have clarified – are you looking for WYSIWYG or hand coding?

    If hand coding, I use an open-source program called HTML-Kit which is incredible.

    http://www.chami.com/html-kit/

    Dreamweaver is between £300 and £400.

  12. Gary

    Thanks Heather. HTML-Kit is ace, but I was hoping to find something WYSIWYG.

  13. Gary

    btw this isn’t a matter of huge importance…