[Techtalk] Helping non-techies with websites -- any experience?

Akkana Peck akkana at shallowsky.com
Fri Oct 28 17:06:19 UTC 2016


Thanks for all the great replies! I guess I'll probably recommend
Wordpress to the woman who's asking now, either at Wordpress.com or
at some other site like Dreamwidth.

Like Miriam, I personally find Wordpress to be way more difficult
than just learning HTML (and way too complicated for a lot of the
people I know who'd like websites). For instance, Leslie wrote:

> A web developer friend advised that, with wordpress, it's possible to edit
> the html/css as you like while still keeping the back-end code as is if you
> have your own host and download wordpress as a freebie.

I haven't found that to be the case. On the Wordpress site I
help with, sure there's an HTML tab where you can type tags, but
only a few tags are supported and the rest do unpredictable things.
And there are a lot of other weirdnesses, e.g. all line breaks get
turned into <br> so you can't include any formatting in your HTML.
It would be a confusing way to learn HTML, and what you learned might
not translate very well to anything outside Wordpress.

I've been thinking that maybe I should try teaching HTML -- not only
for adults who want websites, but also for a teen CoderDojo we just
started up at the local makerspace. People think HTML must be some
difficult technical thing, but when you actually show them things
like <b> or <p> they say "Oh, that's not so hard."

I do wish there was a decent local cross-platform HTML editor that
lets you edit either source or WYSIWYG. There are online ones but
then if the net goes down, you're in trouble.

If I wanted to teach HTML, galleries would be a problem. My own
image galleries use PHP that I wrote, plus some local Python scripts
to do things like generate thumbnails and add images and their sizes
(so I have width= and height= in image tags). It's nowhere near
foolproof, and since it's PHP you can't test it on a local file --
you have to have a web server. Leslie, you said you knew of image
galleries that made it very easy to add and remove images. Can you
recommend specific packages?

There's also the theming question. If you want a consistent header,
sidebars, footer and so forth, what's the best option? You can use
PHP (that's what I do on my sites that need it), or SSI, or you can
run a script after you edit each page to add the chrome. What's
easiest for a beginner to deal with (and cross platform), or are
they all too geeky? Theming may be the biggest argument for a CMS.

        ...Akkana



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