
Ask HN: Visual website builder for muggles (not Wordpress) - ColinWright
Seen elsewhere, asking for an acquaintance, although I expect the demand for this exists in a wider context:<p>I&#x27;m looking for a visual website builder that either runs on a local machine or is self-hostable, that I can provide to several people who have expressed a desire to have a website, so that I don&#x27;t just install wordpress for them.<p>Something that produces plain HTML would be ideal.<p>I&#x27;m looking for, essentially, a static site generator with a UI instead of a markdown and templating based experience.<p><i>Added in edit:</i> To clarify ... imagine something like Word, but designed to build a simple, static website instead of a single document.  No markdown, just editing via the GUI.  Thanks.
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ColinWright
Someone has suggested publii:

[https://getpublii.com/](https://getpublii.com/)

Does anyone have experience of that?

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eitland
Joplin would be my suggestion right now.

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ColinWright
Thanks for your suggestion ... I have no experience of Joplin, so I've gone at
looked at the website, which says:

> _Joplin is a free, open source note taking and to-do application, which can
> handle a large number of notes organised into notebooks. The notes are
> searchable, can be copied, tagged and modified either from the applications
> directly or from your own text editor. The notes are in Markdown format._

In what sense is this building a website? Also, it says that the notes are in
Markdown, and the request is specifically for a UI, _not_ markdown.

I don't see how Joplin fills any of the brief, but maybe I'm just missing
things. Can you explain more how to use Joplin to build a website?

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eitland
It is really easy to export from Joplin to HTML.

And they can input the documents as markdown which is much simpler (unless the
goal is to learn html). Also markdown allows a subset of html so there's some
flexibility.

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ColinWright
The whole point of the question is to have a GUI for the entering and editing,
similar to Word, for example. The idea is to _avoid_ markdown. Technical
people regularly overestimate how easy non-technical people find markdown,
which is why having something like the Word GUI is part of the
request/question/spec.

Thanks for the information about being able to export as HTML, that's not at
all obvious from an initial skim of the website.

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sogen
top of my head:

\- RapidWeaver

\- Tumult Whisk

\- Pinegrow Web Editor

\- Macaw

\- Dreamweaver

