What's a Good (Cheap?) Web Site (HTML) Editor?

I’ve got a web site…which I haven’t actually updated since around 2003… I coded it in a text editor, directly in HTML…

It works, but it ain’t elegant. It isn’t mobile-friendly, because I don’t know how to do that.

Is there a decent, cheap, user-friendly, WYSWIG (“Visual”) web page editor that people here might recommend? I can do the basics in HTML – make pictures into active links, etc. – but not the fancy stuff (resizeable frames and junk.)

Thanks!

IMHO the new responsive web design stuff is best pulled off by buying a template (or getting one for free). I’ve been doing Web work for over 15 years now as a profession and the responsiveness thing somehow snuck on by me. It’s very heavy on CSS and a little JavaScript sometimes. It’s got very little to do with just HTML.

Let someone else with the know-how and the eye for design do the layout of your site (by buying a template) and plopping your content therein.

Any html editor is not going to help you make your site mobile friendly.

I’ve used Weebly to create a few sites - www.weebly.com

It’s a drag-and-drop sort of editor, but you can also dig into the code. You do have to work from a template, which I find a little annoying, but you actually get a lot of control over the end result. I’ve been able to get my sites to look pretty much however I’ve wanted. And you can create mobile sites too.

They offer free sites as well as inexpensive hosting.

If you are looking for a free text editor, Brackets is a decent option.

Edited to add - if you want to learn how to create responsive websites, Treehouse has some good courses that will get you going on CSS and JavaScript - teamtreehouse.com.

Cool, and thanks.

What does make a web site mobile-friendly? I thought it involved a bunch of abstruse code at the top that auto-sensed things from the browser, or sent options to the browser, etc. I figured a good web-site-builder would have that code built in to the “boilerplate,” like legalese at the top of a contract.

I’ve had good luck with www.wix.com - you make a site with their WYSIWYG editor, and it automatically makes a mobile version to go along with it. And it’s free.

It’s in the css (and possibly javascript). I’m guessing that you probably weren’t using css in your 2003 coding, but you can’t really make a decent website without it these days.

If your needs are straightforward, you could do worse than head over to w3schools and check out CSS3 and Bootstrap (css and javascript libraries for responsive websites). I’ve found out that a fairly minimal investment of time was enough to be able to code straightforward basic websites without any particular bells and whistles - but that do look good on the different flavours of devices available.

I’ve used a thing called kompozer, which is vaguely like Dreamweaver. Helped me tidy up a load of nested tables.

http://kompozer.net/

I still use Homesite, which hasn’t been updated in over ten years, because it got sold twice over and is now ignored by its owner (Adobe). So even though it’s still pretty good as an HTML and CSS editor, it’s not kept up with modern web standards or languages - it was abandoned pre-smartphones, by golly!

One of the simplest ways to make a fully dynamic/mobile-compliant site is to use WordPress and the template of your choice. You can stay within the basic pagebuilding/editing framework, or dig as deep into the code, CSS overrides and even template code as you like.

It does add some bulk to the site, sometimes out of proportion to a few dozen text-y pages, but it’s easy, free and a fairly assured path to continuing updates and compliance.

You use something added to CSS3 called a media query, which allows you to write CSS rules that only apply in certain circumstances (like if the device’s width is below a certain amount of pixels).

That way, you can deliver the exact same HTML to all devices, but format them differently based on what will fit on a given device.

For example, on full size browsers your primary navigation menu might be an unordered list of list elements all set to float left and display as inline-block elements (i.e. a horizontal menu), and on mobile devices the same LI elements are vertically stacked block elements inside a UL with 0 height, which expands to full height when someone clicks a “menu” icon that only displays on mobile (i.e. a vertical menu that collapses and expands as needed). Same HTML either way, but different CSS applied based on media queries.

Thank you all. I confess, now I’m daunted, but I will gird my lions, so to speak, and start learning what I need. Thank you for the pointers!

Microsoft has a website editor called Expression Web 4 which is available for no cost but it is not supported either. It will handle CSS, HTML and Javascript (I think). I also think that VB script is supported. It may be overkill but you might look into it.

Bob