The AM Forum

It looks like the time has come to convert the W1UJR website off of Microsoft Front Page 2003, which has not been updated since...you guessed it, 2003. It's gotten increasingly creaky and cranky to upload and manage the site with software now 6 years old, of course the internet has changed greatly over the past 6 years as well.

Since I'm a Mac user now, I'd dearly like to find something that will work with the Mac, and ideally someone with the time, talent and experience to migrate my website over to such.
I still need a program which will allow me with author new pages and update the site, something with a low learning curve.

Any suggestions?

Hi Bruce,

I have been using the Mozilla "Composer" software that is part of the "SeaMonkey" suite. It is a very simple word processing type of interface and works fine for composing html pages and doing simple stuff like inserting photos and links. I don't do much more than that so I can't speak to its abilities to do anything more exotic. I can't even say if it does FTP functions by itself since I use CuteFTP to upload my stuff. I originally used FrontPage 97 but found it to be kind of cumbersome for my primitive needs. Mozilla Composer has a nice simple interface that I was comfortable with in no time at all. The complete SeaMonkey suite is free and a bit of background can be seen here:

http://www.seamonkey-project.org/

I only use XP here, but there are multiple platform releases. The Mac OS X install can be grabbed here:

http://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases/#1.1.18

The instructions for installing the software on Mac OS X can be found here:

http://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases/seamonkey1.1.18/installation#mac

I have enjoyed browsing your site. It looks far more complex than mine so I am not sure if Composer will do all that you require, but it might be worth a look. The price is right anyway!

73,

Rob

bruce, I'd get this.


http://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/

I don't know of anything that will convert your existing files. If you used Front Page add-ons are whatever they are called, you probably screwed.

For editors/composers, iWeb is pretty easy once you get used to it. It makes a ton of files though. I've been using KompoZer for the last few years. It's free. It's a little slow at times but very easy to use for basic stuff. Nvu is similar.

If you are willing to pay there are Taco HTMLEdit, RapidWeaver and PageSpinner. These are fairly cheap (about $25 dollars). If you want to pay more there are Create, Dreamweaver, Freeway and GoLive. IIRC Freeway Express is more on the low end and much lower cost that the full up version. version. The others are pro grade stuff and a little pricey.

If you are going to do anything with a text editor, I'd recommend TextWrangler. It's free. If you want a very powerful text editor and are willing to pay a few bucks, get BBEdit. It's from the same company that makes TextWrangler - Bare Bones Software. They've been around since 1993. They used to have a slogan on there Web site, "Software that doesn't suck."  I tend to agree.

Hi Bruce, lots of good suggestions here. I would appreciate knowing which one you land on and how easy it is to use.  ;D ;D