Posting (and reading) has been light. Last Friday I purchased Namo WebEditor 6 Suite. It is a competitor to Dreamweaver and NetObjects Fusion and can currently be purchased from Amazon from $19.99 (after $60 worth of rebates).

It is the most wonderful web authoring software I have ever used.

It is vastly more powerful than NetObjects (which I have used) and easier than Dreamweaver (which I have not).

In two days I learned the tool, created a customer theme and put up a website for Jim Jamieson, candidate for TN House District 89.

That includes creating the navigation bar (with rollover) that I created using the WebCanvas part of the suite and the custom bullet images (also WebCanvas) — these were two elements of the custom theme that I created for the site. It also has shared content that is stored in one file, so changing a bit of text in one place can be reflected on every page when the site is republished (this is the “Family Picnic” info on the right-hand side of every page except one, as well as the header which is stored on every page).

It has some weaknesses and peculiarities:

1. It took me forever to figure out that shared content can’t be applied to a site without a theme.
2. The theme absolutely has to overlay the banner graphic with text so even if you don’t put any in it seems to blank out the bottom to make room for it or something — I’m still not sure what that problem is.
3. I wish it had a built-in CSS editor. It does not. On the other hand it makes it very, very easy to associate CSS file with a web page.
4. The preview in a web-browser feature can only be launched from the WYSIWYG editor, not the html editor which is where I spend most of my time.
5. I couldn’t get javascript to store correctly in shared content, which was a bit of a bummer.

There were a couple of other things but honestly, other than figuring out the “shared content” problem and trying to make it stop screwing up my banner graphic, I probably spent more time futzing around with CSS layouts than anything else.

It is with the utmost confidence that I say: Namo rules!