From today, if a friend or colleague or family member asks you if you know someone who can create or renew a website for their professional activity or to give visibility to a creative hobby, you can safely tell them, if you have the time and desire, that they you do it because you are an expert webmaster. Even if you have never put your hand in the creation of a site, there will be no problem because there are two possibilities:
1) Create a site for free, without using html code, using a web application among those reported and explained.
2) If the "customer" friend does not want the site to be hosted on external servers or if he already has it, you can manage it in every aspect, from his own PC, with the new Microsoft Web Matrix program, born from the ashes of the deceased and bad Frontpage.
The creation of a website is both a work of graphic creation, design and layout of the pages, and a management commitment concerning the online publication of web pages, backup, updating of files, management of the server, database and etc.
Not to mention that, after making a site, you must also make it SEO (Search Engone Optimization) friendly and, therefore, make sure that the search engines find it and index it well.
To design it you can use more difficult tools like DreamViewer (for a fee) or a free visual editor like Kompozer, the best opensource program to make a site.
You can also use CMS programs on which there is no need to write programming code (see the best CMS to create a website).
Microsoft's Webmatrix, on the other hand, is a single tool that allows both to design the site, to write html code, to use a CMS, to manage files in FTP and publish everything online on one's own domain.
WebMatrix (Dowonload from Uptodown) can be downloaded for free and is available to all Windows users.
This new application is ideal for both occasional developers and professional webmasters because it is able to build web applications that require local data storage, synchronization with the server and also the creation of simple websites, starting from scratch or modifying a software Opensource CMS.
The installer launches a screen listing a lot of Microsoft products.
These packages are not necessary to install and run WebMatrix.
To try I chose not to include Visual Web Developer 2010 and SQL Server Express 2010 and continued with the installation.
The initial download is light but the installer will begin to download the packages one by one and the procedure becomes really long, with the request to restart the computer.
Above all, the SQL Server database takes a long time to install.
After the installation is complete, you will have the latest version of IIS on your computer, including the IIS Web and IIS Media Services extensions such as web server, SQL Server 2008 Express and the .NET Framework database to develop websites using ASP.NET .
I would like to say that the uninstallation is rather long and laborious because each package must be removed separately; therefore I recommend, before installing everything, to create a restore point on Windows so, if you are not satisfied or if you want to remove it, you can go back much faster.
Once the installation is complete, you can see the see the management panel which offers four design options.
By choosing to start with a Web Gallery site, you can start from something already done, choosing one of the available CMS .
Among these there is Wordpress, the famous platform to create a blog and Joomla in Italian, the most famous opensource cms in the world.
WebMatrix can install the site file package locally on your PC or on a server remotely if you already have hosting (management remains easy from the PC).
WebMatrix downloads all the required files including the PHP interpreter .
WebMatrix has four areas of work : one for developing the website, one for distributing and creating files, one for performing administrator tasks and a fourth for optimizing SEO content (for search engines) and for having statistics.
From the work area of the site, you can monitor web requests in real time and configure server settings.
Editing the html code is part of the file workspace and you can see the previews in real time.
To get started, you can also start designing a static website and then decide to add a database later.
WebMatrix supports file transfer protocols such as WebDeploy, FTP and FTPS to communicate with the server easily.
Even if users without a technical background will find themselves confused by the amount of things that can be controlled, WebMatrix still remains a program that saves a lot of time and effort in developing a website.
The simple and intuitive user interface helps you focus on the design without having to worry about managing code.
There are a lot of functions and, at least in my experience, WebMatrix is the only free program that allows you to manage a site in all its aspects, without using other software.
