Buildng a Website: Publisher? Sway? Other?

[coip]

I want to revamp my personal website, as it looks dated. I build it in Publisher 2013, as that seemed to be the only viable Microsoft Office application that can build websites. But it's become obvious that Publisher just isn't meant for website building. I want something easy to use, that results in a clean, modern design, one that works well on mobile devices too. I thought Sway would be able to do this, but it seems that Sway is, not only kind of hard to use and customize, but incapable of publishing HTML to websites. If there are no Office applications that can build good websites, what other software applications do you recommend?

 

[azcruz]

I still use and love Microsoft Expression Web 4. Discontinued and made free. I use it to author and publish to Azure.
Posted via Tapatalk Classic on my 636 build 10166

 

[rhapdog]

In my own personal opinion, if you want to build clean, modern web pages, the best way is to learn HTML, HTML5, CSS3, and use a good quality text editor and do it from scratch. That's a lot harder than using Sway for sure, but way more capable.

There are many desktop applications available for just publishing web pages, and many hosting providers will provide you with tools to build and publish your web sites as well. Those sites built from those are usually bulky and have questionable coding. I've not seen one yet that does a proper modern feel to it. This coming from someone who built web sites for a living as my last programming gig before retiring.

There are programs designed for the web, like WordPress, Drupal, and many others that will allow you to customize them to make your own website and these will do a better job of making it modern and compatible with mobile. If you want a website like that, then you're either going to have to learn some new skills or shell out money for someone to do it for you. There's no such thing as life being easy.

Best of luck to you.

 

[Kevin Rush]

Re: rhapdog,
Just curious, could you please name "a good quality text editor" or two?

 

[rhapdog]

In my opinion, UltraEdit is what I consider the best text editor. However, opinions are like noses. Everyone has one, they are all different, and they all smell somewhat.

There are actually many quality text editors on the market. Much of it will depend on the OS you are using on your laptop and/or desktop.

TextMate is great on a Mac.
On Linux, the number one choice is Vim by many hard core programmers, but Eclipse is easier to pick up and learn.
On Windows, there are many, many choices. Notepad++ is quite capable and free.

Personally, I use UltraEdit and UEStudio on Windows, because I purchased a lifetime license a number of years ago when I was doing computer programming for a living. Haven't had the use for either in a while now, but I've got free updates for life because of my license.

If I were just getting started today, I'd look for a free editor to use while I learned the language to determine if I really wanted to do the programming. If I were to decide to make a living (again) doing the coding, then I would consider investing in a higher quality professional editor.

Another text editor for you to consider, which I haven't used because I haven't done any programming since it came out, is "Visual Studio Code". It's a trimmed down version of the editor included in Visual Studio, which is the best development environment on the market. It's FREE, which makes it a really great deal.

Visual Studio Code is also cross platform, and can work whether you're on Windows, Mac, or Linux. I'd probably start there.

 

[coip]

Thanks for the suggestions. For the time being, I'm sticking with Publisher 2013 just because I know how to use it (it's very similar to Word, with the Ribbon menu, and the drag-and-drop, and whatnot). My only gripe is that they removed the ability to embed HTML code natively, but I found a workaround. You can embed HTML code produced elsewhere by copying and pasting it into Publisher. It'll show up as an un-editable object in your project. If you then use Publisher to convert that project to HTML for use as a web page, you can then, before uploading that HTML to your website, open the HTML with Notepad and then slightly edit the embedded HTML code you pasted in. Then you save the Notepad file and upload the HTML to your site as normal. It should show up (if you don't clean up the HTML code via Notepad, it doesn't work when you publish it to the Web).

This way I was able to create a Sway presentation at sway.com--a slideshow of annotated figures and graphs and then embed that Sway presentation into my website! It worked our quite nice, actually, considering how little I know about HTML and website building.

 

[Kevin Rush]

Thanks for the suggestions. For the time being, I'm sticking with Publisher 2013 just because I know how to use it (it's very similar to Word, with the Ribbon menu, and the drag-and-drop, and whatnot). My only gripe is that they removed the ability to embed HTML code natively, but I found a workaround. You can embed HTML code produced elsewhere by copying and pasting it into Publisher. It'll show up as an un-editable object in your project. If you then use Publisher to convert that project to HTML for use as a web page, you can then, before uploading that HTML to your website, open the HTML with Notepad and then slightly edit the embedded HTML code you pasted in. Then you save the Notepad file and upload the HTML to your site as normal. It should show up (if you don't clean up the HTML code via Notepad, it doesn't work when you publish it to the Web).

This way I was able to create a Sway presentation at sway.com--a slideshow of annotated figures and graphs and then embed that Sway presentation into my website! It worked our quite nice, actually, considering how little I know about HTML and website building.

Very nice. I like the idea of the sway presentation (from the sway web site) accessed from within your web site.