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Web Publishing Tools for Kids? 86

Posted by Cliff from the an-introduction-to-the-web dept.
fuzbuh asks: "I want to help an 11 year old who wants to publish a site for kids, and am thinking about what tool(s) to provide for her. Her experience is limited to email, web browsing (on kid sites), and computer games. This, as a first step for her, needs to be easy, and more focused on content than form. What do people suggest for tools for her? A web based page builder (which one)? A WYSIWYG editor (may be a bit complex). A 'Wiki' where only she can edit? Maybe I should just start her with a blog to post her ideas and stories. What have others done? Any ideas and/or suggestions? Thanks in advance!"
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Web Publishing Tools for Kids? More

Web Publishing Tools for Kids?

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  • Time constraints? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Acidic_Diarrhea ( 641390 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @07:26PM (#7604076) Homepage Journal
    What type of time do you have to help this child in the learning process? You note that a WYSIWYG editor may be a bit too complicated for the child but I think that if you have some time to spend, the child would easily adapt to using that. It would also challenge the child more than simply saying, "Oh, here's a free blogging site. Type into the box and hit 'Submit'."

    It's good for kids to be allowed to explore and learn on their own but I think giving them a step up (into using a simple editor) and then allowing the child to explore on his or her own, has added benefits of requiring a bit more thought.

  • Standards compliant (x)HTML (Score:4, Insightful)

    by GigsVT ( 208848 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @07:40PM (#7604213) Journal
    There's no reason an 11 year old can't learn to write standards compliant HTML or XHTML. It's not a complicated language. Just make sure to show her how to validate her pages.

  • Coffeecup Html Editor (Score:3, Informative)

    by hookedup ( 630460 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @07:41PM (#7604218)

    I would suggest you check out Coffeecup Html Editor [coffeecup.com].

    Lots of features, yet easy for beginners, oh and it has a "Live Chat feature" [coffeecup.com], which may be much for an 11 year old, but maybe mommy can help? :)

  • Really.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hawkbug ( 94280 ) <psxNO@SPAMfimble.com> on Monday December 01, 2003 @07:42PM (#7604220) Homepage
    I hate programs that write crappy pages for you. I have the opinion that if everybody who wanted to create a webpage simply learned a little html before doing so, the web would be a better place. It doesn't have to be flashy - just learn the basics, like body, table, font, p, br, etc. A little knowledge goes a long way. I'm sure even an 11 yr old could understand basic concepts like those, probably even quicker than most adults. You could "borrow" a page layout from some other site, and set up templates for them to edit. It could fun, while at the same time I don't think it hurts to challenge a kid.
    • Word save as html.
      Netscape Composer (sub Mozilla).
      A quick walk through on this html help site [super.net.pk]

      If I could program on my Apple //e in Basic (not well mind you) html shouldn't be too difficult for an 11 year old.
      • Word save as html.

        Ouch, talk about crap HTML. If you do that, be sure to run it through the demoroniser. [fourmilab.ch]

        • It is crap but this is an 11 year old. In word she wouldn't have to know html at all.

          A lady I work with does webpages for various church organizations, hospitals, etc. and she uses Publisher. The html is insane. What is done in 5-6 pages worth of html can be done with a table and two rows! lol. It also converts 1/2 the text to transparent gif images!!! Lol. Nightmare.
          • It is crap but this is an 11 year old. In word she wouldn't have to know html at all.

            Ahh, the "learned helplessness" approach.

          • It is crap but this is an 11 year old. In word she wouldn't have to know html at all.

            I knew HTML as an 11-year-old. It's not that hard. Maybe she shouldn't be doing all of her writing in it, but she should at least know the basics.

      • OpenOffice.org Writer in HTML mode. WYSIWYG, much better HTML than word, and click on the @ in the toolbar to see/hand-edit the HTML as you go. And runs on other than MS-Windows, and can be legitimately taken home (or to school) and installed there.
    • I'm inclined to agree with hawkbug here, although to begin with she might find it a little confusing, she would definitely gain a deeper understanding of how web pages work, which in the long run is going to help her considerably. My advise is to start out with virtually any WYSIWYG editor, but only to learn concepts. Personally, I use vim (text editor), FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and occasionally Dreamweaver (WYSIWYG editor) when there's an obscure problem with the design. I'm not sure if you can get Dr
    • Please don't ever ever ever tell anyone to use the font tag (or really the br tag for that matter) they are both deprectated and should never be used if you want to produce up to date standards compliant code. I realize this is only a kid, but why teach her old news when there's plently of current stuff that's just as easy she could be learning.

      • Re:Really.... (Score:3, Informative)

        by hawkbug ( 94280 )
        To get around using br and font, you would have to use CSS and div tags combined, neither of which are 100% compliant across the browser-board yet. I go with what works on everything until browsers are better standardized.

  • Depends on what the kid's interest is. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dalutong ( 260603 ) <djtanseyNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday December 01, 2003 @07:43PM (#7604237)
    When I was 11 I was already familiar with many WYSIWYG editors. I had moved on to doing HTML and Javascript coding. I knew some basic C. I had taught it all to myself because I was interested in it.

    If I had only been interested in the content then I probably would have been satisfied with a WYSIWYG editor.

    So figure out what her interest(s) is/are. If she wanted to know how to do web development, then let her start poking at teach yourself HTML guides online while she plays with some WYSIWYG editor. If she is only interested in publishing, however, then have her start planning what she would like her site to look like, have her start writing the meat of what will be on the site, and then teach her the basics of a WYSIWYG editor.

    If she wants to have embedded blogs, then it's time to at least teach her the basics of the web and of HTML, PHP, Perl, or whatever else might be included in the blog software.

    Sorry I can't give you a better answer. I can only say, "it depends on her interests."
    • Wait - so you're saying that the WWW was in popular use when you were 11?!? Suddenly I feel very old indeed ...

      For what it's worth I concur with those who are suggesting that the kid be taught HTML before being let loose with a WYSIWYG editor. I was doing Z80 assembler by age 11 so I think it's safe to say that a children can learn a simple markup language like HTML. Especially as they'll have the joy of starting their HTML career with a largely standards comliant browser base.

      • Indeed the web was in popular use when I was 11. That would have been 1995. I also switch myself over to using GNU/Linux that year.

        Eleven year-olds can do just about anything. My girlfriend has a nine year old in her calc class. That might be a little much... meaning there might be a physical beneficial abnormality helping him out. A friend of mine has a brother in the third grade who has can talk to be about base 2, 10, and 13, though.

        Certainly you have to present the material in the right way, but I wou
    • No kid knows C at 11. What parent is going to buy their kid a C compiler? And don't tell me that you downloaded and installed Linux, gcc, etc. at age 10. Oh wait, you (at least claim to) use Debian, so maybe you are as cool as your smugness indicates.
      • Um... A couple of things.

        I didn't mean to be smug. I am sorry if I came off that way. I was simply trying to say that kids can do a lot. I didn't say I knew a lot of C, but I could write a program that could accept input and do something with it. (i.e. type in your name and password -- unencrypted.. or even hidden -- and it will say "hi username! glad to see you" or "sorry, wrong password" if it didn't match up. And no, I did not have the passwords stored in a database. It was a big "if" statement.

        As for
  • I, for one, am planning on being very unhelpful. so fuck you.

  • When I was 11... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sailracer6 ( 262434 ) * on Monday December 01, 2003 @07:46PM (#7604261) Journal
    That is, 8 years ago, I had my own website. I taught myself basic HTML and wrote it up in Notepad. So did all my friends, as we had all just gotten our netconnections for the first time and were quite excited about it. I had a Star Wars page. This was long enough ago that Theforce.net didn't really exist yet, and it was still possible for me to get into the upper listings at Altavista.

    Anyway, no reason that can't still be done. Best way to learn about such basics as HTML, UNIX, and FTP. Just give them a UNIX account with a few privileges -- that's what my ISP gave me back in the day.
    • Anyway, no reason that can't still be done. Best way to learn about such basics as HTML, UNIX, and FTP. Just give them a UNIX account with a few privileges -- that's what my ISP gave me back in the day.

      Remind me again why a kid needs to learn UNIX to publish a home page? Even HTML is debatable as WYSIWYG editors are quite adequate for everything she might need to create.
      • I believe they would need to know basic unix commands to get the pages in the right places unless you are using a non-*nix web server, in which case, may the force be with you because nothing else will.
        • I believe they would need to know basic unix commands to get the pages in the right places unless you are using a non-*nix web server, in which case, may the force be with you because nothing else will.

          So in an *nix system I can't use FTP to upload files where I actually want them? At least that's how I did it with my ISP assigned web space...

      • ...HTML is debatable as WYSIWYG editors are quite adequate for everything she might need to create.

        No. It's not.

        There have been times I have written school reports, essays, etc. because I need to use images and Word does a horrible job of handling images on a slow system. All my pages are plain XHTML with lots of CSS added on. And god help you if you have Internet Explorer--don't even think about telling me what I did wrong...

        Meh.

        Not knowing HTML makes it really hard to make a good site. Teaching CS

  • when I was four I learned HTML.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01, 2003 @08:01PM (#7604431)
    and built my web site using good old plain vi.
    It was a great learning experience but I quickly moved onto Perl and Postgresql.
  • fogcreek has a nice app called CityDesk. It's very easy to use. You can create a template for her and when she graduates to learning html, she can write her own. The personal edition is free. Windows only.

  • Helping an 11 yr old. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by idommp ( 134503 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @08:26PM (#7604663)
    The real question here is: how comfortable are you with the technology you're introducing to this child? Can you stay far enough ahead of a young inquisitive mind to stear her in the right direction? If she suddenly wants to know all about cascading style sheets are you going to freek? Do PHP and SQL cause you to loose sleep at night?

    If you're totally comfortable in this arena, then, by all means, introduce her to the nuts and bolts of web programming. If not, then point her in the direction of one of the "free" page hosts that provide a template driven page layout program.

    Education, in any field of endevor, is simply a matter of providing a safe environment in which the recources exist for discovering on their own what you wanted the student to learn in the first place.

  • Frontpage (Score:5, Insightful)

    by a.koepke ( 688359 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @08:45PM (#7604800)
    I will most likely get modded down to the basement for posting this but what about Frontpage.

    You get it for free (well you get Express for free) and its so easy to use even a kid could figure it out. I do not think we should expect a little kids website to be perfectly valid HTML. Using Frontpage will make sure its not....
    • Yeah, most native English speakers can understand people who only speak pidgin English just fine, so I don't think we should expect kids to speak (remotely) correct English. It's much easier to teach them pidgin English.

    • I was going to make the same suggestion. Frontpage or Dreamweaver would be an excellent choice for focussing on content over form. The poster could set up the tool such that it edits on the live site, eliminating extra steps of publishing for the kid. As a service to the kid the danger of screwing things up could be minimalized if the poster would remotely back the site up once in a while in order to have a recent version to restore if necessary.

      How the rest of the posters have such small brains that t

    • I do not think we should expect...perfectly valid HTML. Using Frontpage will make sure its not

      I can't tell if you're being serious or sarcastic.

      I'm curious if fuzbuh is planning to let his/her 11 year old post just anything to the web site, or will fuzbuh screen the content first? I'm interested in this topic because my seven year old wants his own web page (he's so damn creative I can't wait to see it), and I plan to build it with him, starting Christmas break. My plan is to build a web site locally, the

      • There's no way I'm going to let my seven year old upload pages to the public site

        Why not? I'm serious, I can't think of a reason why it would be bad or dangerous for a kid to post their own content to the web. I'm not a parent, though, so maybe I'm missing something.

        • Here's a few reasons:

          They post private information about themselves, e-mail address, AIM username, that kind of thing. Somehow, it falls into the hands of a paedophile who uses the info to get a headstart on grooming the kid (they probably will already know about the kids hobbies etc. from reading the site).

          They may post stuff that is defametory and/or libellous. They don't like/get bullied by a kid at school, so call him a poopyhead - parent of said child reads it, ISP gets notified and not only remo
  • My daughter has been using dreamweaver for over a year to maintain her personal website.

    She is even using templates to give the whole site a uniform look and feel.

    Does she ask questions whenever she wants to do something new or different? Yup.

    Do I think dreamweaver is too complicated for an 11 year old.
    • I work at an Educational Tech Training Center and we recently had a group of 4th, 5th and 6th graders in for a Dreamweaver/Fireworks workshop.

      There is a new program here in Georgia called Promote [promotega.org] that has groups of kids as young as 3rd grade creating instructional webpages. I've also seen Adobe GoLive and Frontpage used by these kids to do some amazing things. You would be amazed at what some of these youngins are capable of.

      P

  • w3schools. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jonadab ( 583620 )
    Send her here. [w3schools.com] Really. I taught myself HTML in my spare moments during a weekend using a much worse tutorial than that, and I was in college at the time. Kids learn faster. In three hours she'll have the HTML figured out and be looking for clip-art.
  • Okay. An eleven-year old girl probably uses AOL.

    AOL has a built-in webpage builder. Use it. It will work fine for any simple website which an 11 year old would want to make.

    I used its first incarnation many years ago. It was a great introduction to webpage design. Since then, I have learned HTML and C++, and am in the process of learning PHP.

    Also through AOL's homepage builder, I learned that no matter what the method is, creating a decent website takes a lot more work than is outwardly apparent (
    • And perhaps you use tables for layout and the evil font tag! To learn to create *good* websites, you don't start with a tool that gives you a bunch of misconceptions that you may never recover from. You start with the simplest starting point that is in the direction of goodness.

      One can create great websites with a tiny sub-set of (X)HTML. Is it really too difficult to learn 10 elements? I could teach this to any kid in less than an hour. If you want to get stylish, you can learn a bit of CSS. With this

    • It amazes me how ignorant and arrogant some slashdot readers are. Seriously, do you really think that she's going to want to learn HTML for her first website? I did. Well, sort of. I started with basic text-formatting HTML at 12 and by 13 and 14 worked up to basic webpages and framesets. By 15 I was up to tables. What I'm saying is, don't underestimate the girl. If I could have found an easy-to-understand tutorial on HTML, I would have used it for my first page (And by easy-to-understand, I mean easy to u
      • Oh. I completely agree. But don't force her to learn HTML if she doesn't want to. Let it progress naturally. If you force her to learn HTML right from the start, she's probably going to become disillusioned of the whole concept.

  • I'd say it depends on what sort of website she wants, what sort of content she intends to put on it.

    For lots of regularly-updated stuff, a blog is good.

    For mainly text-based stuff that isn't blog-like, Wiki software is good. Text-based HTML editors are also reasonable: if you only use simple tags, (like I'm doing in this post), HTML is easy to learn. You might want to help her set up CSS to make it look pretty.

    I don't have much experience with WYSIWYG web-building tools, so I won't comment on the.

  • You want her to get this [blizzard.com] job, right? :)
  • A good as in free wysiwyg html editor is Mozilla Composer, which comes with Mozilla. It includes ftp support.

    A good free standalone ftp client is FileZilla.

    Beyond that, all you need is a good image editor. I believe Paint Shop Pro 5.0 doesn't enforce the 60 day trial limit like 6.0 through 8.0. There's also the gimp, a free, but powerful open source image editor, but the windows version is always more buggy and less up to date than the linux version.

    My experience with Tiki-Wiki is limited to installing i
  • It's an excellent product, already at 2.0, with much thought put into ease of use and user experience. It has a personal edition which is free, and the full edition is cheap. Definitely better than Wikis (they usually are a mess for non-technical users). Maybe an account at Blogspot or TextAmerica would be even simpler, but a blog is not a website... you decide what you need.
  • the first 'language' (yes, i know, not a real programming language per se) that I learned whatn i was right around that age was HTML, it introduces the logic process common to programming, and once she has HTML down, CSS, and PHP is easy to add in. PHP of course paves the way for the bigger languages. HTML is VERY visual which helps the first time learner (especially a child).

    DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE HER! show her HTML now, and she'll be outdoing you in C+ database apps at 16 :) OK, mabye not, but
    HTML->PHP-

  • The Same Thing You Would Use (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ONOIML8 ( 23262 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @10:13AM (#7608348) Homepage
    I see some folks on here have mentioned Dreamweaver. I don't think I would want to purchase something when I could do it for free and keep the content free, and I want to teach my children the same. I also don't like the whole product activation thing.

    My 8 year old boy has started doing his own site using Mozilla Composer. There are some tools on the web, counters and such, that generate HTML code and he's learned to cut and paste that code into his document. When he does he reads the code and tries to understand it, asking questions along the way.

    There are plenty of ways to create web content, kids can use any of them. They will suprise you and you might even learn something from their work.

    Note that we don't have a Windows based system anywhere in the house. Imagine a child, probing his/her way around the computer in the learning process. Tried that, got tired of fixing broken computers because the kids had screwed something up. My kids, 8 and 6, learn on their own Linux computer. I've had to do less sysadmin stuff to that box than most of the machines at work. They experiment along, lots of trial and error and theres no big panic when they screw something up. Both boys find themselves at home now on Solaris and FreeBSD machines too.

    So let the kid use the same tools you would use.

  • Might I suggest that you locate a site that offers simple templates? Now - before everyone gets spun up -


    I am in no way a computer person - but my job is dragging me into the 6th circle of hell - the IT world. I located a 10 page template with a style sheet. I saved the original files and then made a set that I renamed. I borrowed a few html books and taught myself. I understand that there are even html books for kids - easier reading with the same end results!


    Good luck!
  • Mozilla [mozilla.org] has a built-in, basic WYSIWYG editor.

    Have her use this for basic layout and content and then view source/experiment with the HTML using (free) HTML-Kit [chami.com] to get a grasp of what's going on.

  • Webmonkey for Kids (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hether ( 101201 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @04:11PM (#7611471)
    I'd point her towards Webmonkey for Kids. They have some really neat stuff to get her started.

    http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/kids/ [lycos.com]
  • I'm 13, and I've been programming interactive (PHP, mostly) web pages since I was 11. There's no reason yours can't do some basic HTML.
  • If you don't mind older software, try "AOLpress". I still use it. Here's why:

    It's basically a browser that also acts as a wysiwyg editor. You can also see/edit the source of the page. It has a pretty decent parser for cleaning up the code, and it does a decent job of checking the syntax on simple HTML. All this, and it's free as in beer (though not as in speech).

    Here's why not:

    It's out of date abandon-ware. I don't know if it's legally obtainable, but many people (like this guy [aol.com]) still have copies of i

  • Is she doing it because of the topic(s) she'll publish on the web, or is she a budding webmaster?

    If she's more into the content of the website, rather than the website itself, go toward the less-technical side of things (without dumbing it down too much).

    Above all, give here a good fundemental foundation! Code away!

  • For Christmas last year I got my (then 10 yo) son a domain name and a book on HTML. I set his Mac up with BBEdit and an FTP client, and after a couple days of reading and just a little bit of help from me, he had a site up and running.

    It's pretty hard to navigate, and some of the HTML is questionable, but he had a lot of fun with it. I'm going to help him get set up with PostNuke soon, as he's kind of bored with writing HTML.

    I'd like to post the URL for his site, but it's better if I omit it to protect
  • I had my first website when I was nine. I had an HTML book, a few tutorial websites, and notepad.

    HTML is really simple, especially at a young age. If you don't care about standards (I'm sure an 11 year old girl sure doesn't) then that is a great way to start. She can learn as much as she needs to do what she needs.

    Plus, you're obviously involved somehow. You should be able to help her with the very basics.
  • My twelve-year-old daughter has developed a reasonably sophisticated web site complete with chat room and bulletin boards. She wrote all the HTML and Java code in Emacs and runs it under Tomcat. She has learned an incredible amount in a very short period of time and many of those skills will be applicable outside of web development.

    Kids are much more capable than most people give them credit for.

    Regards,

    Patrick

  • I'm a Web Weaver fan (McWeb Software). It only costs around 20 for the standard and 25 for the plus, which I would recommend as you get the extras like JPerk. It's been around for a few years. You work in an HTML environment rather than a visual, HTML blind environment like FrontPage. But there is also Web WeaverEZ, which is for FREE and a great way to get started. It is frequently used in a school lab environment.
  • Unfortunately its not a complete commercial quality product, but I thought Denim [berkeley.edu] would make an excelent program for kids to learn to make web pages. Its exceedingly simple and I think any child that can read could use it easily.
  • Movable Type offers their TypePad [typepad.com] service which lets you (verbatim):
    • Publish a weblog
    • Publish a photo album
    • Maintain lists of your favorite books, music, weblogs, and links
    • Personalize your site's colors, layout, and design
    • Connect with others who share your interests
    • Limit who reads your weblog through password protection

    That should be everything an 11-year old girl needs, unless she has some interest in learning CS.

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