Website creation

I have a friend who wants software for creating/designing/editing/whatever a website. He will also need to set up and retrieve data from a database for display on the site. For website design software, I suggested vi; posting his response is probably a violation of forum policy.

He is not a techno-idiot; indeed, he's a SAS programmer. But he wants to get away with learning as little web technology as possible. His web pages can be fairly simple, he is not trying to be fancy or to impress anyone. He's willing to pay some money but strongly prefers spending lots of it. But the need to interface with a database may put his needs out of range of freebees such as nvu or arachnophilia. Any ideas for products can help him with not only the html, css, and perhaps javascript he'll need but also the php, asp, or whatever for backend dealings with the database?

Thanks in advance.

 

Last I knew, vi was the name of a text editor on unix systems... (although I prefer joe myself). Is vi the name of something else as well?

Why not investigate what tools are provided depending on where he hosts his site? Maybe there's an ISP out there that will provide all the tools he needs.