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Basic website editing software
Such things as Microsoft FrontPage Express, Kompozer, etc. Building your own website without bloatware!

Not everyone understands HTML, and although HTML is the most efficient way of building a website that loads very fast, it's not for everyone. However, the good news for the html'less is that there are some basic simple gui-based website editing tools that enable the non-html person to build a website but without getting bogged-down in the bloatware which blights many a good web idea.

In the old days, I would say that Microsoft FrontPage EXPRESS was one of the lesser of the evils. The code it produced was not too bad, and it did not muck-up the edits and tweaks of HTML much. Note: I'm stressing it is Microsoft FrontPage EXPRESS and not the full version named Microsoft FrontPage, which from what I've seen creates awful bloaty code! The snag with Microsoft FrontPage Express is that it's quite difficult to get nowadays. It was given away free with the old Freenetname disc, but that's quite tricky to get now.

Another alternative that's been suggested is Kompozer, which you can get at www.kompozer.net , and this has the advantage of being available for Linux as well as Microsoft Windows. I hope Kompozer produces better code than the old Netscape Composer which as I remember it produced mismatched <p> and </p> and various other html-manglings.

There are also Linux-based web tools connected with Konquerer and Mozilla, but again, I am not sure what the code is like.

The important thing is to avoid paying a lot of money and getting software that's overblown and produces bloatware code. This slows down everyone's browser and it tends to get you lower down on any searches.

You can build your own website with basic website editing software. Do this offline, then publish. Avoid online website building tools as there are all kinds of problems with them! Also see the basic plan of a website

In essence, a good basic website editing program has the following characteristics:

1. You can edit your web pages without fuss.

2. The code* produced is reasonably compact (you can check this by seeing how small the resulting size of the htm file is).

3. The code produced is reasonably easy to understand, so you can learn from it and eventually get to be able to edit and write your own HTML yourself!

* code? I mean source-code. You can see this by doing VIEW/SOURCE/HTML on a webpage. Try it.