AboutKen Ivey Expertise I've been developing websites for almost 20 years. If you have questions like these, I can help! Should I try this myself or hire a professional? What tools do I need? How do I sell products online? How do I make money with my website? Can I create a website without buying expensive software? How do I design a website FAST? How do I market my website? Is a BLOG a website? How do I put video on my website? What is website hosting? When will search engines find my website? OK, I've found a site I like - but now what? Can I make my website a subscription site?
Experience I have over 20 years of practical experience with web-related issues, and some military computer training. I've worked for a computer manufacturer, and own a small technology company specializing in web-design, hosting, and internet media production. I am the webmaster of several sites, and e-newsletter editor for Rotary District 6760 which is comprised of 65 clubs throughout middle Tennessee.
Education/Credentials I'd like to say a diploma from a revered educational facility hangs on my wall, and perhaps someday it will. In reality, everything I know has been self-taught, much of it done so in the hallowed halls of that venerable institution called "The School of Hard Knocks". (I have taken courses at a local community college, and received military computer programming training as well.)
Expert: Ken Ivey Date: 2/22/2008 Subject: Microsoft Publisher versus 'Real' Web Design Software
Question Hello Ken. As will become obvious from my questions, I am new to the web publishng arena. I know a bit of html and css but only at a very introductory level. I have a TypePad Pro Subscriber account, with a number of 'blogs' defined on there, but no traffic yet to speak of. I do want to have at least one real blog, where I might sell some of my own items, but I also want to have more conventioanl web sites where I can sell my items. Given all of the positive press about using blogs as web sites, I've tried doing that with a TypePad blog. It seemed at first that the user-friendly nature of blog publishing, plus all of the available widgets & code snippits (including things like Paypal widget and e-Junkie for e-commerce), would make creating sites via a blog platform fairly easy. However, that has not been my experience so far. As one example, it is difficult to get the formatting the way I want it on TypePad pages. The WYSIWIG editor seems buggy, because the way my text looks in the editor and the way it gets published sometimes differ. And the editor is very slow, especially since I sometimes have to switch between rich text and plain text views. I have also tried creating posts and publishing them via Microsoft Word 2007, and then copying the posts over to pages in TypePad. Even this method often ends up with WYSIWIG issues, and it's a lot of trouble. Another concern I have is that I want my blogs and my web sites to have the same theme, or at least look very similar to each other. I might even want to incorporate blogs into my sites and/or link among them. I have been trying to figure out a good web publishing software that's easy and relatively inexpensive. Since I have MS Office Pro, I tried making some sites via Publisher. They look fantastic compared to my crude TypePad efforts, and they're really quick to make/update. The only thing it seems I need that Publisher lacks is a way to manually edit the html (for adding widgit-like code snippits such as PayPal and e-Junkie e-commerce). Is there some relatively easy way that I could use to be able to manually edit the Publisher html? I mean, would it be as easy as just doing a 'View Page Source' in IE, manually editing Publisher's output for a given page, and then FTP'ing the edited page up to my web host? I don't mind buying a web design/publishing package if that's what I need, but I don't want/need a really powerful (and possibly complex) package like Dreamweaver. Thanks for your help. -SGR
Answer Hi Grace - nice questions.
I would advise against using Publisher for your web ventures, but if you're dead-set against a better solution, you can publish to html and then edit the code in notepad. Not pretty - or easy - but doable.
If you use MS Office, and it sounds like you do, you might be interested in Microsoft Expression Web which is FrontPage's replacement. At only $99 Upgrade (for Office users) it's a pretty powerful solution. Download the trial version and learn more here:
You might also do a Google search for "free html editor"; many have publishing capabilities.
As far as using a blog, I recommend using WordPress. Just a preference. My website is a WP site, with little in the way of customization. But it's effective! And WP also suffers from weak WYSIWIG editor syndrome,so I typically create the content in a cool text editor like NoteTab Pro, then cut/paste into the WP editor. Many people like Windows Live Writer http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!D85741BB5E0BE8AA!174.entry
