Non-techie web development

If you or a non-technical family member wants to put up a web site but doesn’t know anything about HTML, there are a number of options available. There are tools like FrontPage, Dreamweaver, and even the free Nvu which will let you build websites. However, even those tools are overkill if you just want to put some basic things online. (Nvu is also buggy to the point where I’d consider it worthless). Because my mom was looking to put up a website that she could manage herself, I investigated stuff like online content management systems, because when you’re working wholly online you don’t have to worry about uploading files, relative/absolute links become less of an issue, etc.

I didn’t find anything that looked particularly easy to use until I stumbled on SiteKreator. My mom was able to walk through the tutorial and set up her website with minimal frustration. They have a lot of built-in tools for creating image galleries (it auto-creates thumbnails, auto-aligns them, and auto-links them to big versions of the image) and laying out blocks of text/tables/graphics together. It’s an interesting UI as well – not nearly as complicated as the other WYSIWYG tools, but it still offers a “drop in arbitrary HTML” feature which would let you put a paypal button or some other fancy stuff in if you want.

3 thoughts on “Non-techie web development

  1. We’re just using the personal edition right now. Even with that you can use your own domain, so it’s got everything we need.

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