I am helping my dad with building and managing a website for his nonprofit organization. He already has an account and domain with yahoo small business web hosting and our aim is for me to create and publish the initial website layout on my computer, while allowing my dad the ability to easily update basic content like text and photos from his computer.
From my computer, I want to be able to preview any changes he makes to the site(from his computer) and doublecheck for any errors before re-publishing. I’m not a huge fan of Yahoo’s sitebuilder program so I am exploring third party programs which allow this kind of site managment. Are there any good sitebuilding programs that have this feature built in? What is the simpliest way to preview an website with it’s unpublished changes from an outside computer/location?
I found this builder www.soholaunch.com which seems like it could be what im looking for but would like to compare it to others out there.
Everyone here is going to give you one of two recommendations: use a real CMS such as Wordpress (not these jackleg sitebuilder programs), or build it yourself by hand. Basically, you build the site, preview it in your browser(s), then launch it when it’s ready and begin bug fixes. The sitebuilder programs are generally more trouble than they are worth.
Are there any particular CMS providers/utilities that stand out among the rest in terms of value/quality/ease of use? Suitable for my needs?
I have built a few websites in the past mainly using MS FrontPage, with only a basic knowledge of html editing, typically just for smaller tasks. My dad has less sitebuilding experience then me so I’m aiming for something without too steep a learning curve. Also, as we’re stuck with Yahoo webhosting/domain for a year, I’ll likely publish through their server, unless I find a better option thats free or very cheap.
I know that I need to do some research on all this but it would be really helpful to have a good starting point. All insight is greatly appreciated.
First off, do a brain purge of anything connected with the term “Front Page”. That program was evil, and did immeasurable damage to the concept of good Web design.
There are a ton of free CMS programs out there, with varyingly steep learning curves. Wordpress is a popular one, and suitable for most non-power users’ needs, but you do need to have some PHP skills along with some HTML/CSS experience to make it do its thing properly. There are some strikingly simple CMS programs out there than do a pretty good job of handling data, but generally, the easier they are to use, the less powerful they are. (There’s a lot of flex in that statement.)
I don’t know the details about your Yahoo! account, but I should think you could build and upload your own site without having to build it through the inbuilt sitebuilder. The biggest question is whether it supports PHP, MySQL, and/or other such languages and programs that most CMS programs depend on.
If you really want to go the easy-peasy route (and nothing wrong with that!), you might consider a pre-rolled WordPress.com blog. No coding or anything, uploading text and photos are dirt-simple, and you get to choose from a lot of templates. It may not be flexible or powerful enough for what you want, but it’s an option. The other posters and I were referring to Wordpress.org, which is a lot more complicated and a lot more powerful.
That program was evil, and did immeasurable damage to the concept of good Web design.