ISO Easy Tool/Software to Create Web Site

June 19, 2009 10:25 AM

I need a tool (web-based or software) to create and easily update a web site that will be hosted in a subdirectory of a domain that I don't own (i.e. myemployer.ca/myname).

I created my web site on Weebly. Love the ease of use and all the drag and drop loveliness and it basically does everything I need, except one thing: I can't publish my site. I put my site on my employers domain (it's a professional not personal site) in a subdirectory. Weebly can't cope with anything other than my owning my own domain. I can download my site as a zip file, which would be fine except that none of the site internal links work as-is. They all point to the root directory rather than a subdirectory, which means I have to edit them, which is asking for trouble. A friend wrote a script to change them automatically, but the thing is this: I haven't updated the page in 3 years because it's too much of a pain. Update on weebly, download, run script, re-upload whole site, etc. Not worth it for small changes and even with big changes I can't be bothered.

I have three options:
1) Find a new development tool. This is the ideal choice if it exists)
2) Buy a domain name and continue using weebly. Not a great choice. It's the easiest but no one does this. None of my colleagues have their own domain so it would likely seem weird and full of myself. (They either have assistants do their pages, have crappy ugly pages that haven't been updated in 5 years, or have no pages at all).
3) Buy a domain name, use weebly and somehow mirror my domain at myemployer.ca/myname. This would be second best: All the ease of option 1, but still having my site on my employer space which is the more professional way to do this. But I have no idea if this is even possible.

THE QUESTION: I'm looking for 1) Advice on which option to choose. 2) What site development tool I could use for option 1. and 3) Whether or not option 3 is possible and how I would make that work.


REQUIREMENTS FOR NEW SITE DEVELOPMENT TOOL (Option2)
- Must be able to create site-internal links that will go to the subdirectory not straight to the domain's root directory. This is where weebly fails me.
-Should make it relatively easy to transfer all needed files into my web space by FTP.
- WYSIWYG point-and-click, drag-and-drop, and all the other marks of a weenie wannabe are all great for me.
- Should put together the structure of the site more or less automatically (e.g. add new pages to a menu bar, create site maps if necessary, etc.)
- I have no design sense other than saying "that looks nice" or "that looks amateurish. If I have to do my own design work, it will look amateurish, so bring on the templates.
- Free or cheap. ~$40/year would be acceptable.
- I don't currently include a blog page, embedded media, or any password protected areas, but I could imagine doing that at some point so bonus points if does this.

The site includes ~6 pages listed on the menu. The pages include e pictures, links to pdfs (also hosted as part of the site), external links, and a few pages of text. I've checked out blinkweb.com and sitekreator.com. Blinkweb can't do the subdirectory thing (like weebly) and sitekreator requries that they host the page and costs too much.

posted by If only I had a penguin... to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Oh, and my computers are Windows-based.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:26 AM on June 19

Option 3 is perfectly possible. In essence, you make a completely separate website and then ask the IT guy to make mycompany.com/myname point to myname.com. You'll have to buy hosting and a domain name, though, which will probably be more than $40/yr.
posted by katrielalex at 11:24 AM on June 19

Just to be clear, Option 3 is not redirecting. Option 3 is somehow automatically mirroring (That is, taking all the files at myname.com and creating duplicates at myemployer.ca/myname). So visitors to the site see myemployer.ca throughout their browsing and never know I've done something as self-important as unprofessional as registering my own domain.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 11:53 AM on June 19

could you use a subdomain of your company's domain? (http://you.yourcompany.com) and point that at the site?
posted by gregjones at 1:23 PM on June 19

No. Sorry, just not how the web space is set up: personalpages.myemployer.ca/myname . That's the option and they're not going to move tens of thousands of user accounts around to change it for me. And my department IT guy is probably a good 10 pay grades below a person who could set that up, regardless. He's more of a "can you come up and clean up my viruses" kind of guy. He gets upset if we plug in our own new office computers cause setting up new computers gives him something to do. He doesn't do programming or server-anything or anything of the sort.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 1:42 PM on June 19

something as self-important as unprofessional as registering my own domain

Huh. What industry are you in, that registering your own domain would be considered self-important and unprofessional?

Would putting up a simple page at personalpages.myemployer.ca/myname that contains a frame wrapping the real address of your site work? Something like this, for example? Because then you could use the free subdomain of weebly and point the frame at your employer's site to that.
posted by hades at 4:12 PM on June 19

On second thought, your best option (assuming that you like weebly) is to use weebly's free "publish to a subdomain of weebly.com" option and then use a mirroring utility to make a snapshot of that which you can install in a subdirectory of your employer's site. Let me see if I can get pavuk working under Windows.
posted by hades at 4:22 PM on June 19

Ok, this should work:

+ Download WinHTTrack from http://www.httrack.com/.
+ Create your site using Weebly and publish it to a subdomain of weebly.com (their free option)
+ Use WinHTTrack to create a local mirror of your Weebly site on your hard drive.
+ Upload all the files from your local mirror to your employer's web publishing space.

HTTrack will rewrite the absolute links to be relative links, which means that the files on your hard drive should work anywhere, including in a subdirectory. If there are dynamic parts of your site--a blog with comments, a "contact me" form, a message board, or something like that--this method won't work. Most likely, as soon as someone interacts with a form on your page, they'll be taken to the yoursubdomain.weebly.com site. But for static content, it should work just fine.
posted by hades at 4:39 PM on June 19

Wow, how does that work? Yes, either of those options looks good. I think the wrapping might work better just because it looks like mirroring might require also changing test (So within-site links point to /myname/file.html instead of /file.html. Unless I'm wrong.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 4:40 PM on June 19

The downside of wrapping it all in a frame is that, unless Weebly lets you add target="_top" to external (external to yoursubdomain.weebly.com) links, then once people hit your page, any links they follow will also appear to have the url of your page at your employer's site. And, for that matter, people won't be able to link to specific pages in your site; just the entry page (since the URL doesn't change as you navigate within the frame). Also, anyone who's paying attention will know that you're using Weebly for hosting, since that's what the links will look like in the status bar.

Doing the mirror/upload process means that every time you make a change at Weebly, you'll have to repeat the mirror/upload steps, but links will work and nobody will necessarily know that you've used Weebly, except for the "make your own free site with weebly" footer at the bottom of the page (which you could remove with a text editor before uploading to your employer's site). Within-site links will point to "file.html", rather than "/mysite/file.html" or "/file.html", which will mean they're portable to any directory at all. (That is, if you're at personalpages.employer.ca/yourname/file1.html and there's a link to "file2.html", your browser treats it as a link to personalpages.employer.ca/yourname/file2.html.)

NB: mirroring a weebly site may fall afoul of section 7(q) of their terms of service. It's hard to say. It's certainly not the way they intend for you to use their service.
posted by hades at 5:02 PM on June 19