Website development tools for non-professionals

So, it was time to reinvent and my content was brewing in my head. I was ready to put pen to paper (fingers to keyboards?) and needed the best website development tool very little money could buy!  Realizing my original approach of using the free editor that came along with my hosting service would not work, I moved up the price ladder by going with Aspiresoft which is a content management system provider. The idea was I could manage and change the content whenever I needed to and won't have to rely on someone else to do the redesigning. On the plus side, the tool is online so I can get to it from anywhere. On the down side, it's not the easiest tool to learn specially if you are not a web designer (I know basic HTML but I am not a web designer!). Also their tutorials are lacking so you have to commit to learning by doing if you go this route.

As should be obvious by now, I decided to keep my blog separate mostly for SEO reasons. That was 2 months ago. Since then, I've learned more about WordPress which is also an online CMS provider and if you are willing to go with their basic templates, you can host your website there for FREE! (you still have to pay for your domain name). WP has a very powerful blog tool. As for keeping the blog separate from the website, I am starting to lean towards having both under the same domain name.

So, I got busy with my new website. A couple of weeks later, I was asked by my sister to design a website for her as she was preparing to run for office. With her site, I took a new approach. I used Godaddy as the domain name provider and host but instead of using their low cost website editor (I used such a tool for my very first website offered by Verio and quickly learned that you get what you pay for!), I chose to dust off my old 2002 version of Dreamweaver software and build the site on my local hard drive!

So now, I have experimented with 3 different ways to build simple websites by a non-professional:

1) Cheap website editor - very ineffective even for simple websites but very low cost.
2) Content Management System - powerful but probably too complicated for simple tasks and could be costly for SW licenses and monthly fees.
3) Dreamweaver editing tool - middle of the road complexity but it helps to know basic HTML. Reasonable onetime cost of purchasing SW.

Of course, I still plan to try out Wordpress. I would like to try integrating my website and blog but it needs to allow me to transfer my work so I don't have to retype anything. The goal is to keep the costs down as low as possible since I am doing all the work and they are just hosting my bits.