What do you use for teaching pupils website development?

[fafster]

The current head of ICT is retiring, and never dabbled with building websites. However, his replacement is going to be starting in September and is keen on it.

 

So, what does your school make use of? Is there anything FOSS that would be suitable, or would it be worth going down a paid route?

[featured_spectre]

If you want free - KompoZer is a good one, poor mans dreamweaver essentially.

If you want to pay - Dreamweaver is the way to go!

[witch]

We use Trellian Webpage which seems to do what we want and is free

[Soulfish]

We currently use MS Expression Web - seems to do the job well enough for us

[p858snake]

Notepad... It's the only real way *runs away from the crowds*

[dyoung5]

Notepad... It's the only real way *runs away from the crowds*

 

I agree. It irritates me that I have to sort out problems with students' websites when they've used a WYSIWYG feature in Dreamweaver and have absoutely no idea how the code works and why their links don't work, etc.

 

Although I would be kind and let them use Notepad++.

[fafster]

I think Trellian's looking like the app we're going to go for.

 

And I agree about learning HTML. It's not difficult, and gives you greater confidence if you want to take things further.

[featured_spectre]

Actually, I just took the decision to move to trellian looking at it and playing with it. Thanks for the info on it Witch!!

[BenTruscott]

I learnt to design in notepad and the notepad++ and I find myself increasing going back to the basic tools rather than using dreamweaver

 

Its a much cleaner way to code, I just have my firefox with a bunch of colour pickers and rulers a nice fat folder with links to sites

like w3c and a awesome copy of notepade ++. You need to know the basics of anything and coding esp

[ict_support]

use dreamweaver and a template so they can see what they are doing, they will naturally progress to the code as there confidences increases.

[john]

We have Dreamweaver from back in the Macromedia Studio 8 days, this is to become Dreamweaver CS5 over the summer along with Microsoft Expression Studio thanks to realising we get it as part of our Schools Agreement

[CyberNerd]

We used to use dreamweaver, but ICT dept decided that teaching HTML is a bit old school now everything is CMS. We use Google Sites now as it's more to do with presentation than code.

[witch]

Actually, I just took the decision to move to trellian looking at it and playing with it. Thanks for the info on it Witch!!

 

You're welcome - now I shall 'fess up and say that it is my ICT coords baby!

[webman]

Unfortunately, they use MS Frontpage here

[AngryTechnician]

We used to use dreamweaver, but ICT dept decided that teaching HTML is a bit old school now everything is CMS. We use Google Sites now as it's more to do with presentation than code.

 

We've gone down the same route. When you think about it, making websites from scratch is something that not an awful lot of people do any more - we're all using CMS systems now. Web design from scratch is a fairly specialist field these days. We're teaching our pupils how to set up and run a blog. We considered a service like Google Sites but we wanted something on premises, so I've got a WordPress MU install on a WAMP server. I've installed a highly customisable theme for them to use so they can still cover the actual design elements of picking colours, fonts, backgrounds and layout, without having to worry about the technical elements of HTML.