I have a website that I created with a web page authoring program, that I use to distribute information about certain automotive parts and promote the parts and services I have available. Over the years, I have used a couple of different software programs to build these pages myself, but am looking to build an improved version of my site with more varied content and options.
The programs I have used seem to do the job pretty well, but they have not had any updates or upgrades in several years, and I feel that they have been abandoned. I think a more modern and serviced program might be the way to go. I am thinking that some people here have done the same thing and can recommend some software that may work better for me.
I have my own domain name and hosting, and like to have a program that requires no HTML programming, other than what the program does automatically for you. The website is mostly text with quite a few pictures, which I have edited separately.
Though I don’t have them now, I would like to add some videos and a shopping cart feature, and have the pages work with the newer media of smart phones and tablets. I am using a PC with Win 7.
Any recommendations or advice would be appreciated.
It has a huge following, with a zillion plug-ins (“widgets”). It’s not great for a site where every page is a different format, but that’s probably not such a great idea to begin with.
Adobe GoLive 9 is what our office uses. You can get used copies on Ebay. We actually started with GoLive 4 and updated several times. You don’t have to find Ver 9. Ver 5 and up are all good. There are a lot of really good tutorial books for GoLive available. Many used and cheap.
Dreamweaver replaced GoLive We decided not to mess with buying it. GoLive does all we need.
I looked it up. GoLive 9 came out June 2007. A little out of date but it still works quite well. We had an evaluation copy of Dreamweaver and strongly disliked it.
In this day and age, nobody should be forced to author their own websites anymore unless they’re a professional or a hobbyist. Even Wordpress is unnecessarily complicated and notoriously insecure, especially once you start adding plugins for videos, shopping carts, etc. You’ll also have to deal with PCI security standards for credit card processing, which isn’t trivial. If you go that route, your site will likely have viagra ads all over it in a month and your customers’ personal information will probably be stolen in two months.
Use a hosted content-management solution like Squarespace or Squarespace Commerce and let them take care of all the coding and security for you. You just provide the content: text, graphics, videos, etc. and they deal with all the backend stuff.
You can also create an Amazon store or an eBay storefront to reach out to those customers.
Websites are extremely complicated now thanks to platform/device/browser diversity and ever-growing security issues, and you shouldn’t be making them yourself any more than you should be making your own car. If you’re still wondering which program to use for basic HTML, you really should not be rolling out your own ecommerce site.