snipkin

WordPress <http://www.wordpress.org> has gradually evolved into a fairly capable yet easy to use (in my opinion) CMS. Originally it was just for producing a weblog, but now you can add as many separate web pages as you like to your site, with tabbed, drop down navigation, breadcrumbs, hundreds of good looking templates (or 'themes'), no, one, two or more sidebars and, as you get more proficient, you can modify it to your own design. There are thousands of WordPress 'plugins' to add almost any function you could need to your site. With WordPress you now don't need to have a blog page at all - and if you do it need not be the 'home page' - but most websites tend to include a blog (or news page - same thing really) these days, anyway. You can easily sign up for a free hosted WordPress account at wordpress.com (note NOT .org) and try it out. I tried MODx <http://modxcms.com/> which has been highly praised and it is probably one of the best, but I had no idea what I was doing: couldn't get the hang of the 'chunks' you're supposed to write yourself. Joomla <http://www.joomla.org/> and Drupal <http://drupal.org/>, both no doubt excellent but overkill for a simple website. CMS Made Simple <http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/> - the name put me off! - but actually I found this fairly straightforward to work with - it comes with quite a good theme and stylish navigation 'out of the box'. A little known project I am keeping an eye one is Jojo CMS <http://www.jojocms.org/> - from a small New Zealand team - which I think could really do well but it suffers from lack of resources and documentation, few templates, etc but it is still in early development. It, too, has a lot of functionality straight 'out of the box'. I've even tried wiki systems - mostly DokuWiki <http://www.dokuwiki.org/> and WikkaWiki <http://wikkawiki.org/>. With the right tweaking these can be used as CMSs too. What I do is first install the CMSs locally using Wampserver <http://www.wampserver.com/> to try them out - which means my PC 'hosts' the system and I do not need to mess up web space with trials and aborted attempts.

The best two standalone WYSIWYG HTML editors (rather than CMS or within CMS editors mentioned above) which are also free/open source are probably KompoZer <http://www.kompozer.net/> and Amaya <http://www.w3.org/Amaya/>. There is also Mozilla SeaMonkey <http://www.seamonkey-project.org/> which is a 'suite' which includes an HTML editor (as well as a web browser and email client) but is also open source. All these will work using the recommended method of an HTML file (for content) and a CSS file (for layout) and have a WYSIWYG facility.