[P1] website creation programs

[George Slusher]

>I used FrontPage on my old PC -- but now that I have a new iBook, I'm 
>not sure what program to use to create webpages. I know a bit of html 
>and don't want a SUPER simple template-driven program like earthlink's 
>Click-n-Build which is way too limiting, but I don't want to write all 
>the html myself, either.
>
>Any suggestions?
>
>
>Pam Sorooshian
>The National Home Education Network
>~The World is Our Classroom~
>www.NHEN.org

It all depends upon how much you want to spend. Freeway and Dreamweaver 
are the top web-page creation programs, but neither is cheap. There are 
some shareware programs--check 

http://www.versiontracker.com/

and search on "HTML." I know that there is one called "Pagespinner," 
another "HTML Creator" and a very simple program called Jesse6 (named for 
the author's daughter). There is also something called "WebToys," which 
is a set of templates and scripts for saving AppleWorks word-processing 
documents as web pages. It works reasonably well, though there are some 
problems. AppleWorks by itself can save a document in HTML. If you want 
to do HTML manually, BBEdit Lite is a great text editor. The full-blown 
BBEdit has even more features, but the Lite version is free. There is a 
set of HTML tools for BBEdit that does some of the  common tags. (E.g., 
you select some text and choose the "italics" tool and it puts the 
italics tags on either side of the text.)

The cheapest way would be to use Netscape, which has a built-in module 
called "Composer" that will do web pages, though I don't know  if it will 
do all that you want. You may have a version of Netscape on your iBook. 
See what version it is. Even Version 4.x had Composer. The latest 
version, Netscape 7.01, is free, if you can last through a long 
download--something like 18-19 MB. For me, that was over an hour and a 
half with a v.90 connection. At one time, you could get the original 7.00 
version on CD, but the 7.01 version has some bug fixes that are 
important. I don't know if you can get it on CD yet. Check Netscape's 
site. 

You may be able to find a copy of Adobe PageMill 2 or Claris HomePage 3 
for sale. I haven't tried PageMill, but HomePage seems to work under OS 
9.2.2; I haven't tried it in the Classic mode of OS X. 

George Slusher/Eugene, OR
gslusher at rio.com