Website software for creating sites

Anyone have a simple (I have frontpage) website creation software that they can recommend. I am doing one for myself, my family page and maybe one for my part time income business as well. I have made them in frontpage, but want say the family one to be more pics and text. The business one would be for advertising, contacting me, completed projects and abilities.

Email would be handled by the hosting company for each site.

thanks

I have had pretty good luck with SiteSpinner.

You can download a fully functional demo to try.

For a WYSIWYG site creator I've heard good things about Dreamweaver, but I've never used it. They used to have a 30 day free trial download.

I also read that Front page is much better than it used to be. I tried it years ago and that prompted me to learn to code plain ole html.

No matter what you use you'll need some html knowledge to control things. www.htmlgoodies.com is a kewl resource site that can help.

Dreamweaver is great but has a steep learning curve. It's also pretty expensive.

Front Page is ok to use but the code it produces is a little bloated and the web pages sometimes don't work properly on a unix server.

Site Spinner is good for a casual user and Web Easy Professional is good too. It has the same free trial option as Site Spinner. They both produce reasonably clean code, just have a little different user interface and feature set. Either should do what you want.

Jim

Danny,
Nvu is the one I found the easiest to grab hold of. I put this site together for our family using it and never get around to having the time to add to it or update.

On one of the admin forums I frequent this same question was asked and I just dug out the answers.
Jerry beat me to it suggestion NVU, but that was the most suggested alternative to dreamweaver.
Webbuilder 2007 was the 2nd most suggested solution:
http://www.blumentals.net/webuilder/

I've never used either of these but respect the opinions of the other admins on the site.

Nvu and Webbuilder 2007 look good and Nvu is free! If I were starting from scratch I would use one of those.

I used FrontPage seven years ago for my family website. But it seemed like I was fighting it most of the time. After I had the structure, (clearly Old School!) Wordpad was easier for making updates. More recently I found a $10 copy of Dreamweaver 4. I like that better than Front Page.

While I don't have a strong preference in web editors (due to lack of experience) there are a couple of photo album builders I really like.

My current favorite is Porta 0.98. It generates the best looking web-sized photos (800x600 etc) of any I've tried. They look much better than Dreamweaver's. In a photo album, appearance of the photos is everything.

I've been posting sets showing visits to the ranch by relatives and guests this summer. I'm kinda shy and don't want Google to index those family sets for the world to see, so to give you an example I put a set showing ranch wildlife over on my other (anonymous) website. If you want to see what a Porta album looks like:
Critter Pix.
Only a couple of those photos are really good. But this illustrates what Porta can do in a minute or two. (I should add that I've manually edited my default Porta preferences into the Porta program files so I don't have to choose everything for each project.)

Porta is dead simple to use. Install it. Put the photos you want to post into a unique folder. Right click on that folder's icon and one of the choices is 'Make a Porta album?' The rest is obvious - experiment for a half hour choosing sizes, skins etc and you have mastered it. Then I use FTP Surfer to upload the album.

Good stuff CA. I have been manually coding picture albums, and it works okay, but the results are not as clean as the Porta example you showed. I downloaded Porta and will give it a try on my next photo project.

Your skunk picture reminds me of one we practiced on in a photoshop class I had a few years ago. Good pics.

Hey Doc!

It just occurred to me I have another Porta album online that shows off Porta using far better photos. See my Hoover Dam photo set.

I posted that a while back for a thread here, then just now used it for an example in Bonehead's video sharing thread.