I am searching for a new web site builder/editor that is geared towards people like me who have some HTML experience, and want a full featured application, but don't have a lot of time on their hands for coding. I created my web site:

http://marlowheights60sand70s.com

almost seven years ago, using NetObjects Fusion. I have been in the IT industry for over 30 years, though I've never been a web designer. My web site is a personal retro site, dedicated to the area I grew up in, with lots and lots of pictures, as well as many stories and articles I've created over the years. I've used a paid Guest Book hosting service (guestbookcentral), and save off my Guest Book to a .csv file every week. There are a few videos on my site, and I would like to incorporate more. I would also like to add a message board, link to my group on Facebook, and import all the Guest Book entries into a section on the message board.

Approximately a year-and-a-half ago, I hired a web designer to overhaul my site, as NetObjects Fusion, my capabilities, and limited time, all put me behind today's web technologies. My site started looking very dated. Also, due to less time available to me, I could not add photos to my site from events or ones that people had sent to me. On top of that I was inserting EACH photo on my site manually, creating links to EACH photo to larger ones when clicked, and individual text boxes as captions for each photo. It was a lot of work! Anyway, the site redesign gave it a fresh new look. However, all the photo galleries are Flash, which quite frankly I do not care for. It does not give me the flexibility I need to size images and thumbnails alike, nor create organized galleries, or allow easy to put up captions. And more importantly, to quickly upload several images at once (like JAlbum, which I have a license for, by the way). The navigation bar on my site is flash, too. In short, I lost control of my web site, and I haven't made any significant changes to it in over a year. I am losing web site followers because people are starting to notice nothing new is going up on the site.

I've done a lot of research on web site design, build, and editing, and CoffeeCup seems to offer what I'm looking for (lots of images, videos, text, message board, a web site store, SEO, etc.) in fairly straight forward, easy to use applications. So here's my question. Since I have an existing site, and given what my needs are, do I go with the VSD and basically recreate the site from scratch, or import what I can into HTML Editor? Also, what other software would I use? It seems like rather than there being one all encompassing web design application, there are separate applications which customers pay for a la carte.

Thanks,

Chuck

I do not do any code at all, yet as a total novice 3 years ago i created my own website, with photo-galleries forms etc with relative ease.

VSD took a little mastering but you have a head start on me as you have some html experience

However you can not import into VSD so yes it would need starting from scratch, but if you want a quick approach it will undoubtedly speed things up

Apparently (i cant confirm) you can import the VSD site into the html editor, so its possible to add all the clever stuff at a later date, when you have time on your hands.

Take advantage of the FREE fully fuctional trials, and the very helpful bunch in the forum, theres a few real experts, and some professionals usually on hand.

In my signature, are my main sites all made with VSD or SCCP & SCDP with a few other CC programs.

good luck

HTML Editor will do what you need it to do for any website editing and creating as well as being able to import (open for the most part) all the pages of your current site. I've never used Netfusion, but I'm sure the HTML Editor can edit it from what I see of your page code. I would highly suggest you get some information and tutorials on CSS and CSS3 as well as HTML/HTML5 so you can brush up your HTML skills and build on with CSS better so you don't have all the CSS code in your pages. Also learning better CSS skills will give you better ways of positioning things instead of using tables for your layout which aren't really used for layout anymore.

As for other programs you may want to check out these: (use the trial versions and check them out one at a time for the best way to have enough time on each)

Website Color Schemer - Helps you work with the Hex color numbers that HTML uses as well as the RGB that CSS3 uses for different effects now. This program will give you everything you need. There is a version included in the HTML Editor (paid version) that is exactly the same program so if you do the paid version of the HTML Editor you will not "need" it, I just happen to like that it's outside of the program and can sit on my taskbar, which the integrated version doesn't do.

Web Form Builder - Should you need any forms from Contact forms to Subscriptions to Newsletters, this little baby can do most everything you need including monetary transactions.

Animation Studio - If you'll be dealing with a lot of animation things you may want to take a look at the new Animation Studio that was just recently released. Does some nifty things with images.

Web Image Studio - Gives you a lot of power in a little program for editing images. It's real power is in the images it creates/provides that CoffeeCup has created specially for this program with it's own little file extension. Gives it the Vector type system (only works with CC's own images). Gives you a lot of power over every little aspect of the special images CC creates for us. Very slick little program.

Although I love the Photo Gallery program (yep still use it), it's Flash based and it's resulting galleries are limited to Windows/Linux based systems, which puts Apple products out of the loop as they cannot display Flash items as of yet (maybe never?). It's still a nice program, but I'd suggest a javascript/jquery alternative. If you're interested in using CC's S-Drive then the Photo Gallery will work nicely for javascript/jquery instead of Flash. This feature of the Photo Gallery software is only available to use on S-Drive though. You can pretty easily include the gallery on your site though using an iframe though so it's still doable.

That's really the only ones that you might want to for sure consider, but there are lots of others that might be helpful too. All depends on your site and what you will be adding to it for the most part.

Hope that helps

Appreciate the comments and the helpful suggestions. The problem I have is that I doubt I have the time to spend learning everything I need to know about HTML/HTML5, CSS/CSS3. If I did I would know what I needed to already to take back control of my web site. I am leaning towards recreating the site with VSD. As long as I can do that, and the most important aspect, being able to create new pages quickly and easily, AND add photos or photo galleries just as rapidly, that's the way to go for me. I also need to add a message board, and to be able to import existing Guest Book entries into a place in this message board (via .csv file). Any suggestions for that? Other than VSD, I am not clear on what addition applications I will need, besides something to create a web site store. I have a license for jAlbum, so I'm making an assumption I can import my photo galleries into my VSD created site.

Thanks,

Chuck

You can accomplish a lot with VSD. There's several us that use it for it's speed to create sites but then use the HTML Editor to fill the gaps when needed.

As you can see from her comments Jo Anne has a great knowledge of Web Design and is too much of a lady to offer her service, but having no axe to grind I will suggest two that can help you with your site.

First obviously is Jo Anne and secondly is a lady who is identified by the name Paintbrush(Avatar) both I believe could supply professional advice and handle your requirements, contact them via their site in their signature, they are both much admired for their knowledge and assistance they show others.

I would not comment thus if I too were not so impressed by these two ladies.

So far I've played around a bit with both VSD and HTML Editor and in my initial impressions are as easy to use as I had hoped for. Even with VSD I found that even working with one of the templates, I was still looking all about the desktop, having a hard time finding even simple things, such as adjusting text font size, field fill color, etc. I'm no IT novice, and if something is this puzzling right out of the box, what happens when I come upon a real challenging issue? I don't have time to spend hours on end figuring out the idiosyncrasies of a program. I need something that works and is easy to use from the git go. I'll give those apps the benefit of the doubt and play around more with them, but I am researching other web builders, web editors, on-line applications, etc., at the same time.

It's very frustrating. The full featured applications, such as Dreamweaver, may have way too many features that I don't need. And the learning curve can be very steep, too. I can open my web site with an HTML editor and do some basic things, such as edit existing text and replacing existing photos. But since my previous, "help", created a Flash based site navigation bar, my hands are tied, can't do anything with it. That is preventing me from creating new pages and deleting old ones. With some of the WYSIWYG editors I've reviewed, as well as the on-line applications (i.e., WIX) there's a lot to like about them. But I also have to worry about, "What if?", those companies go away, does my web site disappear, too (particularly in the case of some like Wix)? At least with something that was created using a standards based application (such as Dreamweaver or Bluefish), my site can be edited with any HTML editor.

The more research I've done, I keep asking myself what kind of web site do I have? It's not a blog, and it's not a business oriented web site. It's not a web PAGE. It's a personal web site that is all about nostalgia, a site I dedicated to the area I grew up in during the 60s and 70s. It grew to over 100 pages. It's FULL of images and some videos and audio, as well as many informative and entertaining articles and stories I wrote about the area back then. I have a Guest Book from a third party hosting provider with over 1,100 entries that became a sort of, "Wayback Machine", a treasure trove full of people's first person accounts. I want to import all of these entries into part of a message board (they are saved off weekly into a .csv file). I need a program that either features a photo editor that allows rapid uploading, organizing, and editing of photos, or easily allows importing of same from another program (i.e., jAlbum), and allows easy insertion or inclusion of captions. A user interface would be nice, too, one that allows authenticated users to post comments. I need a simple but easy to maintain web site store to sell related souvenirs via PayPal (i.e., t-shirts, mugs, calendars, etc.). I need to be able to link to Facebook and other popular social networking sites. I need a search feature for my site so people can search on names, places, things, etc., and find it on my site. I want to make as least use of Flash as possible. I send out a newsletter from my Outlook client, and have almost 900 subscribers. This involves creating several mail distribution lists, so that I don't offend the email Nazis at my ISP, thinking that I'm sending spam. It would be nice to have an easy to use newsletter program that is highly customize-able, and would allow me to import all my email addresses in from Outlook.

Sorry for the lengthy post, but I have spent many hours reviewing one web site builder/editor after another, and am having hard time deciding which to choose. So having said all that, what kind of web site would you classify mine as, and what application(s) would best suit my needs, and suit my needs for the long run?

I'm sure Jo Anne and Paintbrush are very, very helpful people. If you are suggesting that I contact them for a possible business arrangement for them to work on my site, I've done that before and that's why I am now not able to do anything substantial to my web site. The first person that I hired to help me with my site charged lots of hours to email exchanges and a couple of in person meetings, and in the end she really had nothing of substance to show me. Waste of time and money. The last person actually did quite a bit of work on the site, taking it from the home grown creation of mine I did in NetObjects Fusion, to a complete overhaul of the site. However, they made use of lots of Flash and that's where I lost control of my site. The bottom is, I haven't added any new features or content to my site for over a year, and it has been noticed. I have checked my visitor logs and people just aren't hitting the site anymore. And I can understand, because if people have seen everything on your site already, and you're not adding anything else, then you've become a stale, static site. People want fresh information and they want a site to be interactive. This is my dilemma.

As a non coder, VSD is the only way i can produce websites, it took some mastering, basically I clicked and double clicked on everything in site to i got a rough idea of what it did, before i started on an actual project

I think what prism may have been suggesting, is that the likes of Jo Ann and paintbrush, who do professional website work, might be able to co-write as you would be using the same tools, so you could have paid help with any tricky bits.

You can send the website files back and forth, and open them in the same program on your own pc

Failing that, make a start, and ask in the forum for help, theres a great bunch in here, I only help with VSD and SCCP & SCDP but theres more help from coders than VSD

Thanks for the info. My concern still is, what if I recreate my site from scratch using VSD, and for some reason the company behind CoffeeCup closes up shop? What would happen to my web site then? Part of the problem I had with using NetObjects Fusion was their proprietary format, in that no one could help me on the more difficult tasks of my site, unless they had a copy of NetObjects Fusion, too. Which makes the case for using a true HTML editor. And that leads me back to my original problem. I can perform basic edits in existing parts of my web site, but not much more. So I am between a rock and a hard place.