| Archive for Downsizer For an ethical approach to consumption |
| sally_in_wales |
Making webpages using Word or equivalent?Now that I have my shiny new webhost, and the shop is slowly coming together, I'm planning a complete overhaul of my existing web pages. All were created with a page builder that came with my last host, so I can't use that, and I was wondering about the relatives pro's and con's of doing the overhaul using something like Word or maybe Publisher, so just building the page as I want to see it then saving as a webpage. The most immediate benefit for me that I can think of would be that I could work on a page at work in my lunchbreak and the lack of 'frills' should mean the pages stay fairly simple and uncluttered, (I'm not allowed to download any software to works computers), but I'm open to suggestions.Any thoughts on making this fairly painless? |
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| jema |
Word? Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
It can be mindbogglingly disasterous. |
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| mrutty |
Word would be fine for typing up content and spellcheckin, but not for anything else. Just fixed a Publisher site and it took all week. | ||||
| sally_in_wales |
Ok, fair enough. What do you recommend- given that I want it a) scarily simple and b) I can't download it at work (though I may conceivably get away with taking in a disk copied from my home pc and uploading it, and claiming ignorance wildly if questioned) | ||||
| mrutty |
Worth loseing your job over a couple of web pages?? Use Word for the text (I normally use Notepad) and then Frontpage, Dreamweaver, whatever to format at home |
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| Bernie66 |
Is that a no? 
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| hedgewitch |
I find Dreamweaver nice and easy to use. I'd go with writing copy in Word at work and doing the uploading at home, definately. It's really not worth using Word for more than writing anf spell checking just so you can use it at work. | ||||
| trigfa |
I quite like nvu and its free 
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| Simon |
I do all of mine using notepad but that is just because I am an HTML addict. I wouldn't even dream of recommending this to anyone. 
Whatever way to go sally, let us know if you get stuck and I'm sure we'll be able to sort it. S |
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| jema |
I am sure our esteemed editor Bugs could weigh in on the delight of receiving html articles written with word 
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| Treacodactyl |
Simple experiment with MS Word, create a little HTML document using notepad, open it using word and save it using word. Now open it in notepad again and see all the extra rubbish it inserts. An example file I've done is 336 bytes in notepad and after opening and saving using word it goes up to 2,592 bytes. I find Word makes it very difficult to tweak the raw HTML yourself if you need to. | ||||
| sally_in_wales |
ok I'm convinced! Just got to find a fairly simple way to open my previously made pages (tthe existing ones on my website that were made originally with Sitebuilder) and rearrange/update them now | ||||
| Simon |
Another argument in defense of NOT USING MICROSOFT WORD!  or microsoft anything for that matter (notepad excepted - it was early days)
Sally, Right click in your browser, view source, make the changes and save as a separate htm file (just in case). This is only any good if you just want text changes or are familiar with html code. It can also mean wading through alot of unfamiliar bumf. 
If you like we can help. We are happy to. |
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| dougal |
Just as a general pointer, (not just sally { } ), its A Good Thing to create all "copy" (the words) without bothering overly about formatting. Break it into paragraphs, yes. Collect together the paragraphs that belong on the same page, yeah. But don't do any more formatting than that until the copy is finished.
Then format it, with an appropriate tool, but only after you've finally decided what you want to say, or contract out the formatting *entirely* to a layout specialist. This is Good Advice whether you are publishing to the wwweb or on paper. |
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| sally_in_wales |
I can do simple things like changing a few words in html, but in most cases I want to completely re-arrange the layout of the pages or create new ones. My html isn't up to that yet, so I think I want a drag&drop type editor where I can move text boxes and pictures around until it looks the way I want, then click save and replace the old file with the new one | ||||
| Treacodactyl |
For the web what you need is something that holds the text and something that then builds the pages automatically, that way you can easily keep thinks updated. |
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| dougal |
Aah, the "content management system"... but that's only really *needed* if the site content is subject to frequent alteration... lets not get Sally too worried - not yet at least! |
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| tahir |
Sally this looks like it'll do exactly what you want, it's $79.95 (free trial)
http://www.newsgator.com/NGOLProduct.aspx?ProdId=TopStyle&ProdView=screenshots |
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| tahir |
Execpt you'd need to load it somewhere... |