I seem to be a similar web developer to your customer. I just want to
create the pages from wizards and pre-created styles, with no
programming.
For ease of use I started with,
MS Publisher. The pages realy do look as they do on the screen at
design time. I think MS made the assumption with this one that the
user would want to draw the pages and leave links/menus to be sorted
out by the software.
MS Powerpoint. You create the pages as if you were creating a
presentation, and can include anything that you would have in a
presentation, music, video etc. Then press to publish and it creates
the menus and links for you. But not a great deal of control over the
actual buttons/banners etc. I found that I had to keep a copy in
native Powerpoint format because re-edits later tended to go wrong if
I edited the published pages.
My favourite of the MS lot is MS Frontpage, the wizards to get you
started are very easy to use. Then adding extra pages etc afterwards
is as easy as adding pages to a MS Word document. Then as you can work
on the documents actually on the web site, updates and corrections are
instant. Inclusion of Excel and Access data is fairly easy, though I
did have some trouble with updates from Access, I seemed to need to
re-link it each time. Even after a wizard you have full control of the
look and feel. You can apply a different template to the entire site
in one go, including your own custom colours and button styles.
The down side of Frontpage for me is the trouble with more than one
site, or sub-domain. It lets you create them but opening them if they
don't happen to be on your 'Last accessed' list from the file menu I
found difficult.
I haven't tried any of the online designers yet, but I did notice that
my own host now offers one. Maybe more are going to go that way, it
seems sensible to have web design tools on site that make use of the
cgi libs that are installed. |
