Advice needed: Making a website

[bobthemole]

I need to make a standalone website. Unfortunately the last time I did any html coding was in 1998, and apparently the have been many technological advancements since them. Enough "technological advancements" that I can't find a bare bones WYSIWYG website creation program.

The programs I already have on my computer (MS Word and Publisher) fill up the source code with obnoxious amounts of junk coding and don't let me do the fine-tuning I want to do. But writing the entire code from scratch in notepad seems daunting, even for the boring static webpage I want to make. Does anyone have recommendations for a webpage-making software that has a small learning curve, produces small file sizes, and (crucially) is free?

Comments

[mergle.livejournal.com]

How do you feel about templates? There are some nice free templates out there for websites; you can then look at CSS tutorials to figure out how to tweak them. That's what I've done for my academic website, and I think it worked out pretty well.

[bobthemole.livejournal.com]

I've never seen a template. Where can I find some, and how can I judge that it's good quality?

[bobthemole.livejournal.com]

and can you link me to your website so i can see what the capabilities are?

[snickfic]

I have a friend who swears by SeaMonkey, which is a browser that comes with a webpage-making tool. I'm pretty sure one of the options is WYSIWYG, although I haven't actually fiddled with it much. But it's free to download.

[bobthemole.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I'll take a look at SeaMonkey.