BlueGriffon Information Page
For those who are more familiar with traditional web design principles, a WYSIWYG content editor such as BlueGriffon can be an excellent tool for creating your personal/project website. Although you need not code your entire page in HTML (although you certainly could in BlueGriffon if you wanted to), being familiar with the fundamentals of coding webpages will be extremely helpful in the process of creating and editing your site.
About BlueGriffon
BlueGriffon is an open-source WYSIWYG editor with many of the features found in proprietary software such as Contribute and Dreamweaver. Because it is powered by Gecko, the pages you create in BlueGriffon will look identical when opened in FireFox.
Using BlueGriffon, you can create and edit documents in the HTML 4, XHTML 1, and HTML 5 formats. In addition to this, the program itself has extensive CSS support, as well as an SVG editor.
What You Will Need
Creating a website from scratch can be a time-consuming process, and quite frustrating for first-time web designers. In order to successfully create your site, you will need at least a rudimentary knowledge of web design (a cursory knowledge of HTML will also be helpful), as well as a familiarity with FTP in order to know how to upload your site to the web server. For those unfamiliar with FTP uploading, web design, or HTML, it would be beneficial to use Google Sites to create your personal/project site instead.
To upload your site, you will need to use the FireFTP extension (included by default with the program), as well as the necessary information that will need to be entered into the program for a successful upload (otherwise, the site will remain only on your local machine).
More Information
More information can be found on BlueGriffon's official website, which in addition to providing more detailed information on the program's capabilities, also provides an extensive user's manual which may be purchased online. A more cursory tutorial on how to use the program is also linked below for those who are familiar with web design, HTML, and FTP.
If you would like to learn more on the basics of using BlueGriffon, please continue to the BlueGriffon Tutorial.