Looking for good freeware web design software.

[Godly Paladin]

I need a powerful WYSIWIG web design program for a small personal website. Not a big deal; don't need tons of scripting capability; it'll definitely be a Web 1.0 type site. I'm sure there's something out there, much like GIMPShop is to image editing, Blender is to 3D modelling, and OpenOffice is to word processing. Suggestions?

[TheMelodyMaker]

Maybe you'd fancy Visual Web Developer Express. ^_^

[Warrior4Christ]

You could try Nvu:
http://www.nvu.com/

(I haven't really tried it myself.)

[Kaligraphic]

I wrote a good number of my earlier sites with notepad.

[Godly Paladin]

I'll try those out. Thanks.

[Esoteric]

If this is for what I think it is, WordPress might be an option. It's intended function is a blogging tool, but it's powerful and highly versatile. I'm actually intending to learn how to use it myself...as soon as I get some free time.

[Godly Paladin]

Nvu shows promise but unfortunately I have no clue how to use it as it doesn't operate like the WYSIWYGs I'm used to. Esoteric - I'll check into WordPress, as Microsoft Visual Web Design couldn't install and I'm not inclined to hassle with .NET to make it function.

EDIT: Apparently only certain hosts work with WordPress, which isn't what I was looking for, since I'm pretty familiar with FreeHostia and I like them a lot. I wonder if Dreamweaver is worth the money...

[ChristianKitsune]

I use Nvu for Stick Monkey Chronicles For an example of how it CAN look you can see my signature for the link to my site.

The only downside I find with it is, I had a little problem with making it so that the little stick monkey heads could be used to click on to go to different pages. It took me about 7 hours to get that to work right... unlike Dreamweaver, it doesn't have the "hotspot" feature. -_- so it was a real pain.

But now that all I have to do is make new pages with colored backgrounds (because I am not the greatest at HTML ^^; ) it's relatively easy.

[Esoteric]

Hmm, I was under the impression WordPress worked with an awful lot of servers. But I guess you would need an MySQL database.

Well, if you're looking true WYSIWYG, then yeah, you're basically gonna have to go with DreamWeaver or GoLive. Both are spendy and (like any high-end software) typically require schooling and/or a good manual to use effectively. I have an old version of GoLive but I really only know how to use it's most basic features.

[mechana2015]

I've used both Dreamweaver and GoLive. GoLive is much simpler, and holds your hand through the process of creation, and, with a little planning can turn out functional, clean looking sites. It is also one of the most literal WYSIWYG programs I have used, allowing you to design whole sites without seeing a single line of code. I figured it out in an evening of poking around, and its very kind to new users once you get over the initial hump of learning the interface (which in the end breaks down to drag and drop, and if you've ever used Indesign, is remarkably similar)

Its sort of the foam kickboard for web design, allowing you to jump in the deeper sections of the pool, and not sink, but it can hold you back.

Dreamweaver on the other hand would be the fins, allowing you to dive deeper into web design, but requires you to get in with the code to execute any site. This program will require a class, or at least some serious time on tutorial sites. My experience with it is limited, and I often found myself online looking for snippits of code to make the program do what I wanted. Dreamweaver also requires a much larger amount of preplanning than golive, which allows for more bumping of elements and such, as opposed to the more concrete results from dreamweaver.

Samples:
GoLive - http://www.csupomona.edu/~pepband/
Dreamweaver - http://www.csupomona.edu/~pnehmann/firesite/