Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

jwolf6589

macrumors 601
Original poster
Dec 15, 2010
4,827
1,590
Colorado
There was a app called KOMPOZER that has not been updated in ages but was a good web editor. On the Windows side MS Front Page was a good editor that also no longer exists. I have a traditional HTML website so I would like a replacement, do you know of any?
 

olup

Cancelled
Oct 11, 2011
383
40
There was a app called KOMPOZER that has not been updated in ages but was a good web editor. On the Windows side MS Front Page was a good editor that also no longer exists. I have a traditional HTML website so I would like a replacement, do you know of any?
There's tons of editors out there, depending on how code savvy you are. http://brackets.io is pretty decent and has live preview/reload built in. If you're looking for more of a wysiwyg solution and don't wanna bother with coding then you may consider porting your site over to squarespace or something similar.
 
  • Like
Reactions: phrehdd

jwolf6589

macrumors 601
Original poster
Dec 15, 2010
4,827
1,590
Colorado
There's tons of editors out there, depending on how code savvy you are. http://brackets.io is pretty decent and has live preview/reload built in. If you're looking for more of a wysiwyg solution and don't wanna bother with coding then you may consider porting your site over to squarespace or something similar.

No I need a wysiwyg editor. Kompozer still works but it has not been updated in ages.
 

Starfia

macrumors 6502a
Apr 11, 2011
945
658
Wow – I don't know if I know of any modern WYSIWYG editors. Like olup said, web creators seem to have diverged into the camps of either coders availing themselves better-than-ever coding tools (Brackets, CodeKit, Coda) or online services like Wix or Squarespace.

Um… possibly Dreamweaver still exists? No idea how it compares lately.
 

960design

macrumors 68040
Apr 17, 2012
3,703
1,571
Destin, FL
Wow – I don't know if I know of any modern WYSIWYG editors.
Because they all generated horrific code that was pushed far down the Google Search SEO. There are currently two camps on website creation. 1) Simple, brochure ( ish ), sites via something like WIX. These are pretty fantastic, but limited. 2 )Hand coded: too many benefits to list. The downside is time and time costs money.
 

jwolf6589

macrumors 601
Original poster
Dec 15, 2010
4,827
1,590
Colorado
Because they all generated horrific code that was pushed far down the Google Search SEO. There are currently two camps on website creation. 1) Simple, brochure ( ish ), sites via something like WIX. These are pretty fantastic, but limited. 2 )Hand coded: too many benefits to list. The downside is time and time costs money.

Amazing how things change. I remember back in 2004 to be a website designer you had to know Front Page.
 

Starfia

macrumors 6502a
Apr 11, 2011
945
658
Because they all generated horrific code that was pushed far down the Google Search SEO. There are currently two camps on website creation. 1) Simple, brochure ( ish ), sites via something like WIX. These are pretty fantastic, but limited. 2 )Hand coded: too many benefits to list. The downside is time and time costs money.

That makes sense – I played with iWeb once or twice and clearly the generated code wasn't meant to be understood or tinkered with. Squarespace at least claims to have highly modifiable templates and accommodate customization points for people with some coding skill.

Now that standards are finally in decent shape after a couple of decades, It seems like we're in a time when a superior visual editor that generates clean, compatible code could theoretically exist; I've just not heard of one yet. (Though also because of standards and CSS evolution, I think hand-coding is as close as it's ever been to visual editing; it's largely at the point where one reasonably intuitive-at-first-glance line of code corresponds to one visual specification.)
 

organicCPU

macrumors 6502a
Aug 8, 2016
827
287
To add my five cents...

WYSIWYG:
I don't use that, but wanted to mention:
https://blocsapp.com
http://muse.adobe.com

WYSIWYGrab:
Then there are a bunch of CMS systems for self hosting or easy setup at your provider's server. Grab a (free) template and fill it with your content, tweak the CSS styles to get YOUR design. Wordpress (said to be easy), Joomla, Drupal (said to be intermediate) or Typo3 (said to be for the advanced) are some of the more popular ones. Grav looks to me like new kid on the block. There are probably thousands of solutions that makes decision for the best fitting system quite hard. I think it's a game of trial and error. Using a CMS can be quite easy, but to master everything in depths, I think it's equal or even harder than coding from the ground. If you don't like to code at all, grab something like Wordpress or pick up a hosting plan with it. To test if that's something for you, install a simple development environment for baked solutions with AMPPS and see how you like it.

Code:
To serve the most individual designs and functionalities it's unavoidable to learn the basic programming languages for the web: HTML, CSS, JavaScript for frontend design. For backend design the core languages seem to change at the moment. For years you had to learn MySQL and PHP to get most projects up. Nowadays I can see a clear trend to NoSQL and JavaScript. Web development is moving from object orientated programming style to asynchronous functional programming style with something like Node.js, React and other JavaScript full stack dev tools. I think it's hard to get into all of this, but you have to start somewhere if you want to go this way.

Or Grab while you learn how to code:
I have a traditional HTML website so I would like a replacement, do you know of any?
If you're used to write some pieces of HTML and CSS code, grab an editor like Atom, grab HTML5 Boilerplate, grab a H5BP theme or a CSS framework and see how far you come and how much fun it is for you.

Everyone is a webdesigner:
The Wix, Squarespace, etc. services are good for everyone that has no idea of those things and just want to build his own site. The costs are probably high in summary (Add-Ons = higher monthly fee) and you are limited in technique freedom, but almost everyone can manage to get his own design (with the help of a template) online. At the end most people I know and deciding for this will come to a point when they need some technical assistance (not to maintain the site, but to configure something or writing a custom Add-On). Those services often offer limited support for their or third party Add-Ons that are not always compatible with international demands (e.g. shopping modules work, but are not conform to law in EU, but US). I don't recommend that way, better hire someone that does it for you.

Have fun while creating your new site!
 

Tholian

macrumors member
Dec 26, 2007
54
1
Stanford
For simple web sites I've been using Sparkle, available on web https://sparkleapp.com or app store. Kind of new and has been improving, it shows some promise. For anything complicated though you will need to know css so you might as well hand code it.
 

mpainesyd

macrumors 6502a
Nov 29, 2008
687
168
Sydney, Australia
I still run Apple's iWeb on an iMac with Sierra - mainly for maintaining some old web pages. I can longer publish a page to the internet - I publish it on a local hard disk and use an FTP app (Transmit) to publish to the internet.
A bit tedious but it enables me to keep some old web pages up to date.
I also use Kompozer for some very old web pages. It also no longer supports direct publishing to the internet.
Some links here
http://users.tpg.com.au/users/aoaug/mac_video.html#iweb
 

jwolf6589

macrumors 601
Original poster
Dec 15, 2010
4,827
1,590
Colorado
I still run Apple's iWeb on an iMac with Sierra - mainly for maintaining some old web pages. I can longer publish a page to the internet - I publish it on a local hard disk and use an FTP app (Transmit) to publish to the internet.
A bit tedious but it enables me to keep some old web pages up to date.
I also use Kompozer for some very old web pages. It also no longer supports direct publishing to the internet.
Some links here
http://users.tpg.com.au/users/aoaug/mac_video.html#iweb

I have both apps and may need to just live with their limitations. I have a very old website (created in 2006) and I have not the time nor interest in updating it, but its still got lots of useful info on it so I pay my yearly membership fees.
 

Ion-X

Cancelled
Oct 23, 2017
303
1,425
There are not really any high-quality, well-supported WYSIWYG website editor desktop apps that are being actively maintained these days.

Your two best options are both cloud-based online services: Google Sites (which is free) and Squarespace (which is about $10 a month).

iWeb was probably the closest to what you were looking for (a WYSIWYG Mac desktop app). These days you can pretty much choose between manually coding your website using a text editor or using a cloud-based service that does not require coding.
 

cool11

macrumors 68000
Sep 3, 2006
1,779
220
Does Dreamweaver supports any kind of 'themes' like the ones that Rapidweaver has?
 

Xowi

macrumors member
Oct 23, 2012
37
18
You may want to look at coda by panic.com, excellent app with company support.
 

Tony Williamson

macrumors newbie
Sep 13, 2021
4
2
There was a app called KOMPOZER that has not been updated in ages but was a good web editor. On the Windows side MS Front Page was a good editor that also no longer exists. I have a traditional HTML website so I would like a replacement, do you know of any?

Well I have the same issues, and cannot find a replacement for KOMPOZER. Has anyone had any luck with this?
TIA.
2017 iMac with BigSur.
 

Tony Williamson

macrumors newbie
Sep 13, 2021
4
2
I need to maintain a site that was developed the old way (using WYSIWYG tools like KOMPOZER) over the last 20 years. There were a number of programs that were available, but all seem to have been abandoned over the past 5 years or so. KOMPOZER still works but only on older 32-bit-app OS Macs.

Rapidweaver might work if I was starting over, but for the small number of changes that I do it is not worth the $ or time and problems associated with importing an old HTML site into a more modern/capable development tool.

Thanks for your reply.
 
  • Like
Reactions: cool11

Boyd01

Moderator
Staff member
Feb 21, 2012
7,694
4,576
New Jersey Pine Barrens
KOMPOZER still works but only on older 32-bit-app OS Macs.

Unless you have one of the new Apple Silicon Macs, you can run legacy 32-bit software in virtual MacOS machines. I use Mountain Lion and Sierra VM's under Parallels for some very expensive old software. Works perfectly for me, and much faster than the old real Macs.

But you need a Mac with an Intel processor for this.
 

SnowLeopardUser9

macrumors newbie
Jan 8, 2022
8
3
If you want an experience similar to Kompozer, you should give Seamonkey a try. It is technically an "internet suite" with an Email Client and Web Browser in it, but it has a component called Seamonkey Composer which shares a lot of its codebase with Kompozer.
 

Tony Williamson

macrumors newbie
Sep 13, 2021
4
2

SnowLeopardUser,​

Thanks for the reply, and you beat me to it. I was just going to send a note saying that Seamonkey was the solution to all my problems. Its a little quirky like Kompozer, does strange things sometimes (at least in table cells), and the undo doesn't always work, but it meets my needs very well. I hope Seamonkey stays around for a very long time.

Thanks to all for the replies.

BTW: Albert Einstein was correct.
 
  • Like
Reactions: SnowLeopardUser9
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.