Welcome to the forums seedub,

I'd recommend considering something like Drupal or Wordpress if you're not set on designing your own site.

If that's not your thing, is the WYSIWYG aspect a must for you?

Using a good text editor and a browser are essentially the same thing. I haven't used a WYSIWYG editor in a while, but as browsers change with each version, I'd consider testing for the browser a safer option.

Thanks!

I find that Wordpress is best for content heavy sites. But often it's way more than I need.

I've used CSS/HTML templates and a text editor, too, but I find that method cumbersome. I like to work visually, and drag-and-drop really appeals to me.

I know WYSIWYGs have a bad rep, but I think they've come a long way recently, and I bet there are some tools that can be useful to someone like me.

I haven't tried openelement but it looks like it's fairly comprehensive. How have you found it so far?

And out of interest, are you on Windows?

I'm on Windows. Also have a Macbook but it's on its last legs.

Openelement looks really good so far. I'm going to put some mileage on it this week. I'll come back with a fuller impression to share.

I got to use openelement quite a bit this weekend. My experience with it has been really good. The wysiwyg is solid (tested it on a bunch of browsers). The interface is good and it lets you dig into some pretty advanced stuff if you want (css properties, custom code, htaccess, metadata, etc.).

Like any program, it takes some getting used to and there are some bugs to iron out, but they have an active forum and it looks like the dev team is pretty responsive to users.

So, yeah. So far, so good. Anyone else try it?

On Windows I'd suggest Expression Web [webmasterworld.com]. Even though it's not being developed it's still better than kompozer for me.

You could look at BlueGriffin and Amaya. Both free and open source. Never tried either.