I haven't tried any of these, but fromthe descriptions some sound promising...

http://pcworld.about.com/news/Nov062000id33868.htm

I use skEdit on the mac.

http://www.skti.org/skEdit.php

As much as it sucks to admit; Microsoft Frontpage really is one of the easier ones. Plus there are 1000's of free templates out there for it.

For a free editor I use the Mozilla web browser (www.mozilla.org). Call up any page on the web that appeals to you and select FILE > EDIT PAGE and it's pretty easy to modify. Handles tables, backgrounds, etc. easily in a WYSIWYG format.

Frontpage used to be truly atrocious. In fact, I have a number of consulting contracts which originated as "we tried to use Frontpage and broke our site" or "we never needed outside help before, we managed with Frontpage until..." phone calls. There were innumerable hilarious stories shared with other web developers. Frontpage 2003, however, produces significantly less bloated, less non-standard code than its predecessors. For a hobby site, it should be fine.

Too bad the same cannot be said of the HTML export features of Office. Stay away from any temptation to "Save As" from Word or Excel.

Dreamweaver is also very widely used and has a very large user community that contributes plugins and templates. The MX 2004 edition is also a big improvement over the slow/buggy MX 2002 edition. It may be overkill for a site that consists of a half-dozen, mostly static pages, however.

Avoid Adobe GoLive.

For the calendar, I'm using Airset for a number of websites. It's a collaborative groupware kind of thing that allows you (or any other member of the group) to easily enter appointments, embed them in a website as an RSS feed or in an iframe, email or SMS your cellphone the day before, automatically googlemap your locations, and probably more stuff I haven't figured out yet. It really beats the heck out of maintaining an HTML calendar yourself.

Here's an example of it embedded in a website: http://cantabileboulder.org/?page_id=25.

Ultraedit works really well for me. Nice interface with a tabbed windows makes it easy to switch between different open files...

vi

Personally I use Notepad and Dreamweaver, but I learned on AWeb Developer by Gary Hodder.

WOW - Airset is great, wonder how they make money!

So far I have found AWeb Developer excellent and easy to use

I'm a bit embarrassed to admit it, but I use an old version of MS Frontpage (97). It does the job for my basic HTML needs.

I've used all of these editors; making websites and web applications is my job. With that in mind:

The Microsoft haters of the world will steer you away from Frontpage, but this attitude seems to miss the point. As another poster has already suggested, the newer versions of the program produce much more conformant code. For 99% of hobbyist sites and 99% of hobbyist applications, they Will Not Care about the esoterica of W3C compliance, and Frontpage will do the things they need it to.

I use Dreamweaver 8 and it would be my recommendation for the broadest range of uses and skillsets. Unlike Frontpage, it doesn't really try to supply you with a template, but it is a good, easy-to-use visual editing environment that doesn't disconnect you too much from code.

For a hobbyist, stay away from Ultraedit, Homesite, and other code-only environments. I make a lot of my best sites in Visual Studio.NET -- a ~$1000 programming environment -- but there's no way in hell I'd recommend something like it for hobbyist/amateur use. These expert systems are made for speed and control, not for ease-of-use for newbie applications.

-KF

You have got to be joking!!!!

I hate the stuff. When working for an ISP and getting website support questions it was *always* Frontpage errors.

I use Dreamweaver at work on my Mac.

I'd love to have Homesite (Macromedia) but sadly it's only available for PC and I saw the light 3 years ago.

Mac users, get iLife 06 and a .mac account. You're limited to half a dozen templates in iWeb but t is fairly OK.

I hate Steve Jobs for iWeb. He killed my line of work with that. *sigh*

/E

Hang on, Homesite worked fine for WYSIWYG for me. It's brilliant on code. Now, having moved away from PC and on to the Mac's I'm a Dreamweaver user too. DW8 is brilliant!

It's over 6 years ago I used Frontpage. At first thought it was the bee's knees until I knew different. With Fireworks and Dreamweaver I gained a whole different understanding on what can be done.

/E - am also in the web industry.

I used dreamweaver before and needed a free alternative and came across this:

http://www.nvu.com/

You may want to look into, it worked ok for me when I used it but didn't scrutinize very heavily on how good the output HTML was.