inherited a website that needs some work

[OhYouBadBadKitten]

I fear I have a steep learning curve! I've no idea about website design. I have a website that I need to manage myself (complicated reasons mean that I'm on my own on this one and can't tackle the previous webmaster for help) In my previous life I did have to do a reasonable amount of programming but that was a long long time ago and mostly fortran!

I can get to all the files on the hosting site. I can see approx how they go together and html seems pretty simple. I can't help but think there must be a simpler way of managing the site though rather than editing html. The host site does have a web builder but it seems very non-intuitive.

So, my question is, what is the best way to tackle the problem?

Thanks!

if it helps, I think it was built using dreamweaver? but I can't afford that.

ok, been doing a bit of looking. I like mozilla, would seamonkey work?

Hi - if you're used to programming, then you'd probably find you got the hang of working in the raw html pretty fast. And you can immediately see if it has done what you wanted, since you don't have to compile it.

I don't know what programs are out there to help you, but I'd say make sure you get a fairly simple one, as I know there are many like FrontPage which "take over" to a large extent, and give you things it has decided you want, not directly what you ask for.

ok, thanks I'm fiddling about with seamonkey at the moment but I think you might be right, might be easier just edit files in html.
I think my concerns will really start when I want to add in pages rather than work with what I already have.

I find you don't often have to start from a completely blank page - just copy one that's similar to what you want and edit from there!

I've done a fair amount of HTML and I've always preferred to use some form of text editor rather than try a design tool.

However I am a coder rather than a designer.

You could try downloading the free Eclipse development environment.

When working with HTML files it gives you intellisense (predict what you're typing and show up various options for your current tag) and will colour code your HTML flagging up errors.

Thanks both
I may try that Badgers. I'm startled how ok it is going so far - but it is mostly deleting dodgy bits!

Just wanted to say thanks! Am getting much more confident and starting to put my own pages on now using html (wysiwygs seem rather faffy)

Netscape browser (perhaps related to SeaMonkey?) has included 'composer' facility for building web pages since about version 3 (I brought back a copy of v3 Gold in 1995 from San Francisco, and I know it has been in versions up to v7.2).

It's free, and has tabs to allow switching between (a) page as one would see it in browser, (b) page with marks to show where HTML code is inserted, and (c) plain HTML source.

Old versions of Netscape (before AOL bought it and added things) can be found on the web, and here's a link to download Netscape v7.2

I've tried the seamonkey composer as I'm a firefox fan. It does look good but I was struggling to get it to upload stuff that I wasn't having problems with when editing them on the hosts file manager thingy. When I'm not up to my eyeballs in things I'll put some proper effort into working it out.

I didn't know they still did netscape I'll have a look - thanks!

Officially, AOL has stopped any support / updating of Netscape, but for the time being, files still exist on their servers and they've done nothing to remove them / force others to stop linking to them

Netscape was based upon Mozilla before AOL brought it, after that they did all sorts of weird stuff before finally giving up. That Mozilla code-base sprung Firefox and SeaMonkey.

Mozilla Composer turned into kompozer and nvu.

But yeah I would recommend Eclipse as well, it's not a wysiwyg environment, but certainly works well as an editor.

Although these days I mostly cheat, if i want a website I tend to throw up a wordpress or some other installation and customize it to what I want rather than actually writing html.

I used arachnophilia, which is a nice simple html editor with a bit more than wordpad and might be a fun alternative.....