davidbarbarisi.com

I've working on the Festa Italiana DC site using a program that created the site before I started updating it, called websitecreator. I just want to say that I really really hate that program. It's probably one of the first WYSIWYG editors I've used, so I don't have anything to compare it to, but I've just been fighting with this software the whole time. At least three times it didn't save my changes. I can't paste already formatted HTML into it. It doesn't allow centering of images. I can't get the lines to not wrap. Worst of all, they charge by the page I guess. It limited me to 12 pages for the site, and it says if I want any more I have to upgrade to websitecreator pro. Now I understand charging actual web designers charging by the page since that's work done by a real person, in which time is a limited resource for that designer. But in this case, it's an automated program that easily adds extra pages without using up anything but server resources, which is what the hosting fee pays for. So I think this is just a case of the cm4all company (or maybe the webhost?) trying to squeeze some extra money out of a customer by setting imaginary limits. They may as well limit the number of words per page. Uh oh, I hope I'm not giving anyone any ideasÂ…

I should also mention that I'm used to mostly using free and open source web software in which there are very few limits. So to me this idea of limiting something like number of pages is crazy. Also I really don't like WYSIWYG web editors. I usually hand code sites, or use a capable content management system and theme it up.

I also feel that as a web application, websitecreator is pretty bad. Lots of loading. And what I think is really bad is that it doesn't fully work on Firefox. But they don't tell you that. Instead it sorta works on Firefox. So for a while I thought it was running really badly, but then I tried opening it in Internet Explorer and it worked a lot better. On Firefox it opens a new window to edit text, but in Internet Explorer it lets you edit text directly on the page. Also I had trouble seeing the cursor on the gray background for editing text. I really had to search around for it. And anything loses points with me if it asks me to disable my popup blocker for that site.

I've just been so frustrated with this thing on so many occasions, that I just had to write about it.