Monday, October 30, 2006

NVU: Free and Easy Web Design Program for (Music) Educators

Like most teachers, I find myself often in the position of having a million new and great ideas but no budget to support them. One idea a few years ago was to create and maintain a website that would serve as the information gateway for my program. My students could find and download assignments and parents could locate information and important dates without calling school.

I knew nothing about web design then so I used what was available at school which happened to be Microsoft FrontPage. I was glad to learn Frontpage is a wysiwyg editor (what you see is what you get) meaning that no html coding skills were needed to create the webpages. As I learned more about web design and a little about html coding, I began to become frustrated with FrontPageā€™s insistence on intruding on the code in my web pages. Microsoft takes the credit for your page by inserting its own stamp every time you update a page.

Having become intrigued by Open Source Software this summer, I wondered if there was a good open source web design program. It turns out there are many but I chose one that I feel is superior: NVU

NVU is a wysiwyg Web Design Program that I find serves my needs better than Microsoft Frontpage. Some of the features are:

  • WYSIWYG editing of pages, making web creation as easy as typing a letter with your word processor.
  • Integrated file management via FTP. Simply login to your web site and navigate through your files, editing web pages on the fly, directly from your site.
  • Reliable HTML code creation that will work with all of today's most popular browsers.
  • Jump between WYSIWYG Editing Mode and HTML using tabs.
  • Tabbed editing to make working on multiple pages a snap.
  • Powerful support for forms, tables, and templates.
  • The easiest-to-use, most powerful Web Authoring System available for Desktop Linux, Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh users.

Read about NVU at its WIKI site here. Download it here.

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