Forum Moderators: mack
After parking our domains for many years, we have decided to start building useful content rich websites that enrich the user experience. We want to start with the learning process with one site and go from there.
Problem is that we have never built any website ourselves before even though we have lots of high quality domains.
Please suggest us a software package that meets the following:
1. Extremely EASY to learn (remember we have no knowledge of coding, programming, or webdesign).
2. Not very expensive.
3. Helps in many things such as: google site maps, meets terms of adsense/ypn, ad placement, etc.
4. Makes adding, changing, managing content very easy.
5. Suggests optimization for search engine for website pages.
6. Has a great admin panel for editing websites.
7. Can be used on a pc or laptop instead of server while making/editing websites.
There are so many softwares that claim to do everything such as xsitepro etc.
Are they any good?
What are you pros using?
And most importantly what should we use given our lack of experience as mentioned above?
Please advise. Thanks a lot for your time and help.
Regards.
I have a great list of them once you've learnt the basics!
While I can code by hand in a text pad, it's infinitely easier AND faster to do it in Dreamweaver.
At the most basic you can also go with blogger or any other blogging software but you'd have to hack it a bit to eliminate stuff you don't need in order to turn it into a CMS.
A CMS software may be an alternative to a WYSIWYG package, and it will speed up development and updates once you have a good template in place.
I did some research on CMS packages after your post and found that there are many CMS packages such as (Mambo, Drupal, Xoops, WordPress, xSitepro, etc) that are available. My original post is besically related to the effectiveness and ease of use of these packages.
I am not sure if I am looking for holy grail but I am certainly looking for something that makes it easy for a newbie :)
I am also not talking about complex database sites but just informational sites to begin with.
I am trying to determine which is 'overall' the best package out of all.
Please share your thoughts and experiences.
Thanks.
Only thing is, it's neither inexpensive or very easy to use. There is a learning curve.
But I doubt if you are going to get inexpensive, easy to use, quick to learn, requiring no knowledge of HTML, etc. all in one.
You are asking a lot, especially admitting that you lack the knowledge you have been paying others for.
I hate to recommend Dreamweaver, but I guess I am partly responsible for unleashing it many years ago. I bugged the heck out of my boss at a small San Diego company to take a chance and add 'web publishing' to their software for publishing catalogs onto CDROMs. They did so, the company was eventually sold to Macromedia, (I think I got like 1/10 of a share of stock...) and the result is Dreamweaver.
Sometimes I wonder if I should have kept my mouth shut. :)
But seriously, it probably is the best product for what you want. And I can testify that it's central principles go back to it's roots - that is, it's not some Pavlov's dog that was adapted to do something it wasn't designed to do. (OK, except for that "CDROM publishing" part... but it WAS designed from the start to publish to multiple formats - initially, print and CDROM.)
Dreamweaver really is the anthesis of a CMS - it's a CMS turned inside-out. And that is perfectly appropriate for many publishers.
Dreamweaver. I used to use frontpage, but I can't believe I took so long to switch. Code is cleaner,
DW is ok for beginners and corporates that know no better, but you know nothing about coding if you think it is clean...it is very bloaty however if everyone in the world has broadband, who's going to notice?
Just remember other users.
[edited by: OptiRex at 3:09 am (utc) on Nov. 7, 2006]
Thanks.
DW is ok for beginners and corporates that know no better, but you know nothing about coding if you think it is clean...it is very bloaty however if everyone in the world has broadband, who's going to notice?
This goes back to the early pre-history of DreamWeaver.
The very first version was assuredly non-bloaty. Then somebody discovered Javascript and went crazy with it. This was well before Macromedia bought the product, and when they got it the notion of tossing-in generous chunks of inline Javscript was already firmly-established...
Keep in mind that DreamWeaver predates CSS. The predecessor product to Dreamweaver had it's HTML capability added in 1994-1995, and was originally developed a few years before that.
People tend to continue to do things the same way, so those who started with DreamWeaver early got used to inlining lots and lots of pretty style markup.
It also suffered from the same syndrome as early FrontPage - no attempt by the software to remove redundant markup. Early Dreamweaver simply blindly expanded templates. So, you put a font specification in a template defination, it would get stuck into every paragraph. (Don't you want to scream when you see old FrontPage-generated pages with the same font repeated over, and over, and over, and...)
And don't get me started on one-pixel transparent GIFs...
Now that it supports CSS, most of this is ancient history. But ancient history lives in habits and examples that die hard.
Are they CMS?
Thanks.
Ruby itself is as elegant and clear as PHP is awkward and fuzzy. The two languages are polar opposites.
A web application framework is a step down from a CMS. You need to be a programmer to use a web application framework. You could write a CMS using a WAF, though, and many existing CMSs build on top of WAFs.
Radiant is one of a VERY small handful of CMSs built on top of Ruby on Rails. At this point it is very basic. It has your usual blogging functions, templating, extensibility, and not much else. You certainly won't find the huge base of modules that are available for Joomla, Drupal, Typo3, etc. (Note that there is another small CMS or blogging package for ROR called TYPO. Has nothing to do with Typo3. To add to the confusion, the most recent version is TYPO 4.0...)
IMO, Radiant nor any other ROR CMS are not ready for prime time. That's unfortunate, as ROR (and other frameworks yet to be build with Ruby) are very promising.
One issue is that ROR advocates tend to turn their noses up at the very notion of using a CMS. They feel it's so easy to develop application in ROR that you don't need a CMS. I beg to differ - the average user can't do a thing with ROR, though a good programmer can do wonders with it. (vs: PHP, Perl, Java, etc.)
The Ruby library and ROR suffer in many areas from lack of complete documentation. It's still necessary to look through source code to find out what some functions do, including some that are fairly central - such as using web services.
In particular, SOAP support is almost completely undocumented, even though it is now a part of the Ruby core library. The essential "bible", "Programming Ruby", leads you down the garden path by giving an wonderfuly-concise example of accessing the Google search API. The Google search API is a trivially-simple example of a SOAP interface, however.
Still, I am a recent convertee, and am painfully working my way through developing support for accessing Amazon ECS 4.0 using SOAP and REST (there is a package available for 3.1 using REST) as well as developing a package to support the Google Adwords API (which is SOAP only). As far as I know, nothing has been released by anyone for either of these.
I think for now - for most users - Ruby, ROR, and Ruby/ROR based CMSs are premature but very promising for the future.
Btw, what is SOAP and REST?
Thanks a lot.
Btw, what is SOAP and REST?
Sorry, I got a bit off-track there. :)
SOAP and REST are two competing means of connecting to "web services", such as Amazon's ECS (provides data from Amazon's product database), Google's search and mapping services, etc.
The major CMSs, application frameworks, and programming languages have multiple modules or plugins available that make it easy to use these web services on your website. There's plenty of available modules and documentation for doing this in, say, Perl or PHP.
I mentioned these particular technologies only as a data-point to show where Ruby and ROR sit vis-a-vis PHP and PHP-based CMSs.
Having such modules available for (non-existent) ROR-based CMSs is a long way off, given that it's nearly impossible to write them at this point, due to lack of documentation.
We are probably 3-5 years from a Ruby-based CMS taking the world by storm. I have no doubt that it will happen, though it's unclear to me that it will necessarily be based on Rails. There will be other frameworks, certainly.
I do think that the language itself has great promise once a wide-ranging base of modules is developed and documented. Perl is King in that area - you can get a Perl module to do anything, and it will be well-documented and do what it says it does.
I sense that Ruby developers have an "attitude problem" that they need to get over. CMSs ARE useful. Reading the source code is NOT a substitute for proper external documentation...
I am kind of comparing CMSs in order to find the one that does most things easy. I guess it will take a lot reading before making the decision to go with one.
I also own Dreamweaver but could never get my head wrapped around it. It's a tough one to learn.
I use CoffeeCup's Web Design Software and it's just about the easiest thing ever. I made the intense leap from stuff like AOL PageBuilder (*vomits a little*) to CoffeeCup because my web host provides the software free. I was skeptical, but it's honestly the best thing ever. One of the programs in the bundle I got from <my hosting company> was the CC HTML Editor. It had a tab for drag-and-drop building, one for code-writing, and one to see the work before you publish it. And you can easily jump from one to the other, which helped me (I don't know HTML from hot dogs from my grandmother).
It's expensive on its own but it's easy to understand, so I'd still recommend it. Best bit of software I've used in a long time.
[edited by: encyclo at 5:48 pm (utc) on Dec. 8, 2006]
[edit reason] specifics, see TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]
