A free website editor

Once upon a time the Netscape Corporation offered a website editor bundled with their browser. Over time that editor grew old an outdated and most people eventually moved on to newer tools such as (the expensive) Dreamweaver. Eventually Netscape essentially closed shop and spun all of their products off to the non-profit Mozilla foundation now known as the creator of Firefox. In any event they did some additional work on the Netscape Composer product which eventually became a part of the Mozilla suite but which never seemed to catch on.

Around 2003 the Linspire Linux company wanted to make a web site editor available in Linux and because the Mozilla code had been converted and was available on Linux they decided to support the improvement of the Composer product and make that available. At the end we ended up with a new free website editor called Nvu. Nvu was great, it offered many of the same features and ease of use found in Dreamweaver for free and was available for Linux, Windows and Mac. The only problem is that the funding was not sustained after an initial release and the developer stopped work on the project and is now working on writing an entirely new editor for Mozilla which appears quite promising but is coming quite slowly and could be several years away.

Thanks to the open source nature of Nvu other developers were able to step in and continue fixing bugs and problems in the software as well as minor feature improvements. Unfortunatly for licensing reasons they had to pick a new name so all new releases are offered under the KompoZer name. KompoZer is still being maintained as a free web editor and for people not looking to use the really advanced features of Dreamweaver I would argue it is possibly the best graphical webpage editor available today. It's fairly simple for novice users to grasp the creation and editing of pages with this tool, though you do still need to have some understanding of how to upload pages and linking structures.

KompoZer is a great tool for use in the classroom precisely because it is free. You can install it without charge on all of the computers in your lab or classroom, students should be able to grasp it fairly quickly and of course students with computers at home can download it and use it for free at home as well. This is a significant benefit for use in education over commercial software such as Dreamweaver. As an added benefit the fact that it operates in a similar manner to Dreamweaver means that if you eventually grow out of it and need some advanced feature in Dreamweaver chances are you'll feel right at home and be able to easily make the transition.