Website Creater/Editor

[ASTDan]

Hello,

I am thinking about redesigning my website.

In the past I hired a student or friend to update and design my website. I like how my website looks and functions, but I want to have more personal control over my website.

I am looking for some kind of program or service that allows me to manage my website. I also want to use a platform that is so simple an engineer can use it, and can help an artistically challenged engineer.

I have found dream weaver overwhelming, and Front page looks cheesy.

Any suggestions?

Dan

[Eugen Graf]

Try Joomla, it's a nice CMS

[Francois Normandin]

I sometimes use KompoZer. It's open-source and includes a wysywyg editor. It's of course nothing compared to Dreamweaver, but it does the job.

Otherwise I use WebExpert which allows a good way of managing code snippets, javascripts and other stuff like this. It's not free, but definitely not pricey either. Its ease of use makes it my day-to-day tool. It's great for maintaining a website already built or to start from a template.

[Irene_he]

Hello,

I am thinking about redesigning my website.

In the past I hired a student or friend to update and design my website. I like how my website looks and functions, but I want to have more personal control over my website.

I am looking for some kind of program or service that allows me to manage my website. I also want to use a platform that is so simple an engineer can use it, and can help an artistically challenged engineer.

I have found dream weaver overwhelming, and Front page looks cheesy.

Any suggestions?

Dan

We happened to have been working on upgrading our company's website lately and had come cross the same needs as you said (more control), below were few options that we have considered:

1. Use yahoo site builder if you hosting in yahoo or similar tool from your webhosting provider: it is an easy to use tool to quickly setup a website with lot of templates, it is html based files. But we found out that it is easy to start first, but a lot of work later if you want to modify the webpage's look. You have to go over every pages to modify the layout. It does not have a master page layout that let you update all pages' layout at once. And it is "still" web pages, not dynamic, so no database etc.

2. If your business is product based, have lot of things to sell, you may want some online store type webpages. You can consider open source like Zen cart (http://www.zen-cart.com/), but it is php based and it could be a lot of work if you don't know php and you want to modify code, besides you don't have many options to change it's look. So it is good for online store (with database), but may not be best as normal webpages.

After considering all these options, we decided to code up from scratch for our webpages, because we want it to look the way we want, yet are dynamic with database etc. So we have our dot net programmer to do the frame work, with asp.net, dreamweaver and MS access. And we have to find a webhosting that supports asp.net and MS access as database. Good of doing this is: we can get dynamic product list, news/events, shopping cart, flash, feedback form etc. Bad is: it is a lot of work, since we coded from scratch. But once we get the frame work done, then it is an easy job to add new products, news/events etc. And we have master pages, which means we can upgrade all pages' layout at once, just like LabVIEW templates.

Sometimes I was wondering if we have made the wrong decision to spend too much time on webpages, but then I decided that we couldn't find a better way to satisfy all our needs if we didn't code up from scratch. At least now we have a frame work of webpages by ourself.

So conclusion is: it is easy to get still webpages and costs free/less at first. But if you want dynamic pages and the way/look you want, it could be just like any other programming project, time consuming too. No shortcuts as far as I know.

If you are curious, check out here for an example of our new webpages (in chinese), we copied the idea of using a flash in home page just like NI does . Our English webpages not yet upgraded, should be soon.

Irene

[Eugen Graf]

Irene, sorry, I don't know if I should say that, but:

the design of both .com and .cn sites is "not the best"

on the .cn site I see only a (left)half of them on my screen with a big resolution

you may think on the redesign of your logo

Of course it's only your thing...

[Irene_he]

Irene, sorry, I don't know if I should say that, but:

the design of both .com and .cn sites is "not the best"

on the .cn site I see only a (left)half of them on my screen with a big resolution

you may think on the redesign of your logo

Of course it's only your thing...

I agree that the webpages are not the best, but we like simple. we spent lot of time doing dynamic things. If it was "still" webpages, you can get a lot of tools with great look. Regarding the "left half" only on screen, I knew this issues, due to IE8, but we should have fixed it and it displays correctly on my vista machine with IE8. So do you mind to tell me what browser do you use and what screen resolution do you use?

I wished we have found an existing tool that get us what we want. Anybody knows other tools?

Irene

[Eugen Graf]

I have used Firefox (last version).

As I just said, try Joomla, it's simple, very flexible and for free

Examples:

http://www.labviewportal.eu/ru/

http://www.labviewportal.eu/de/

http://www.labviewportal.eu/en/

Edited October 2, 2009 by Eugen Graf

[ASTDan]

It looks like Joomla is the way to go. I am really impressed with their features.

I do have a problem. My current host will not work with Joomla so I need to find a new one.

I am looking at www.sitground.com

What I like about them is that they seem to have a lot of support for maintaining a Joomla site.

Does anyone have an experience with siteground? Are there other things I should be considering with a web hosting service? Who do you use to host your website and why?

Thanks

Dan

[ASTDan]

Well I wanted to post this for posterity...

I went with Hostgator for my new host.

http://www.hostgator.com/

I have to say it is waaaay better than my old host for the SAME price!!

There are many hosts to choose from and I tried to go with one that had a lot of space, bandwidth, and good to work with. Hostgator has unlimited space, bandwidth, and has a 45 day money back guarantee. I made the plunge and am happy so far...

I am hiring a company to help me select a Joomla template, port my static website to a CMS website, and give me some training on Joomla. My hope with this is to have some help to set everything up right, and train me so I don't do anything to stupid. Joomla seems very vast and feature rich. I am overwhelmed and excited with Joomla right now and hope the training will focus me in what I need to know for my site.