Hi all,

Once upon a time I used to use the Microsoft product for basic website creation. I'm not a developer, and I'm not proficient in any development language. I'm merely looking initially stand up a couple pages on a site to establish a "web presence", so it doesn't have to be anything super. What's more important is that the tool is intuitive and has a very small learning curve. If it had an 'advanced mode' for super users and/or those with web development experience, that would be a plus, assuming I continue to gain traction with it, but I'd welcome any suggestions you all might have. Thanks in advance ~

Cheers,
Dave

Wordpress.

The days when you edit and upload individual HTML files are long past.

Wordpress is excellent; I've been using it since v. 1.5. It gives you lots of freedom to set things up the way you want and has excellent online documentation.

If you do want just to upload some HTML pages to have a web presence, you might take a look at Bluefish or Kompozer. Kompozer hasn't been updated in a few years, but, for static HTML, it works just fine, though I would recommend using it in conjunction with a text editor; its built-in text editing function is kind of klunky.

Even if all you want to do is throw up a couple of static web pages, it's a good idea to do so using CSS; you pretty much have to know CSS for today's web. About dot com has a great tutorial for CSS beginners; it's not overwhelming the way w3schools is. it helped me tremendously when I updated part of my website to HTML 4 just to get familiar with HTML 4. (I blush that part of it is still HTML 3.)

This is my current favorite CSS guide:

http://adamschwartz.co/magic-of-css/

Writing in HTML sucks. No matter how good you are, you always make mistakes, because it is such a messy language.

Hence markdown.

I find WYSIWYG tools like MS Frontpage and Wordpress a bit quirky. They are like word processors -- bloated and ugly. But markdown is clean.

Go to a site like http://www.weebly.com and create your entire web presence for free.

Quite frankly, if you pay any consultant to build a web-site for you ... e-commerce or otherwise ... you're wasting money now. The economy-of-scale has taken over. The days where knowledge of PHP, CSS, JavaScript and so-on were worth a hundred dollars an hour ... are ... gone with the wind.

I still like doing it this way. I've never really liked WYSIWYG editors.

i always liked using an existing CMS and hacking it for my needs
a CMS like "GeekLog"
https://www.geeklog.net/

is a good one

Thank you all very much for your replies and information! I am on vacation/holiday at the moment, but I will check out each of these solutions and report back my successes and likely failures for the benefit of future "searchers".

Cheers,
Dave