Web Design Software

Lisa McMahon — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 17:13:16 +0000

I have to confess … please don’t hate me — I loved FrontPage. I began using FrontPage when it was first owned by Vermeer in the mid-90′s. I have owned every version from that initial version and have recently begun learning Microsoft Expression Web 2. (I had Expression Web 1 on my PC for awhile but never used it.)

I’ve used a lot of different products over the years including NetObjects Fusion and Dreamweaver. I currently use Dreamweaver CS3 for most of my web development, mostly because of its tight integration with Flash, Photoshop and Fireworks. I am hoping to learn the entire Microsoft Expression Studio as I’ve read lots of good reviews and I find the interface comfortable.

Microsoft Expression Web 2 Features

Professional web design environment
Standards based site design
CSS layout
CSS site templates
CSS style application
CSS Management
Property task pane
Rich data presentation
ASP.NET 3.5
Edit PHP pages

New $299

Namo Web Editor 8

New user interface – ribbon menu
Effective presentation features
Teaching plan wizard
A variety of quiz features
Easy statistics learning
DIV tag through visual not just code
Rich design resources
Connect to a blog

New $99

CoffeeCup HTML Editor 2008

HTML and CSS code completion
Project management
Quick tag help
Quick start from layout
Optimized resource tabs
Cleaner, valid markup

Full version $49

NetObjects Fusion 11

AJAX UI components
AJAX effects and transitions
Data source XML binding
Databind to any object
XHTML 1.0 publishing
Automatic code hinting
Integrate custom scripts
Image gallery
Google site traffic tools
Integrated web apps

Full version $199.95

NetObjects Fusion Essentials

Drag and drop layouts
Site Management Tools
Upload files with built-in FTP
Form builder
Photo Gallery
e-commerce tool
Custom shape tools
Rollover images
Insert custom HTML and scripts
Flash, QuickTime, and more

Free download

HTML Editors

Lisa McMahon — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 15:38:07 +0000

To view pages published on the World Wide Web you need a web browser. Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari are the most popular. The pages that you see on the Internet have been created by publishers such as yourself using a special markup language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language). This language provides the instructions to the browser on how to display the page.

The simplest form of HTML pages, also called static HTML, can be created by anyone with a text editor. For example, Windows users could use the built-in Windows Notepad application to create web pages. Although you could use this application, there are other HTML editors available which are much easier to use. Notepad2 is a free, lightweight editor that includes syntax highlighting for a number of programming languages including HTML. A more comprehensive editor is Arachnophilia, which is built using Java so that it will work on a number of different operating systems.

Most word processing applications, like Microsoft Word and OpenOffice provide a way to save regular documents as HTML documents but they usually contain a lot of extra code to support the formatting you have used.

Quite a few of the web hosting companies offer site building tools but you will quickly find them limiting. See Yahoo! GeoCities or Google Sites.

Even if you decide to purchase a software package to assist you, I recommend that you learn at least the basics of HTML coding.

The following are some commonly used text editors that may be used to create web pages (must know HTML):

WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web authoring tools

Free	Inexpensive	Not cheap
KompoZer SeaMonkey Amaya Trellian Aptana Studio (works with Eclipse) Bluvoda Evrsoft First Page	Freeway (for Macs) iWeb (for Macs) RapidWeaver (for Macs)	Adobe Dreamweaver Altova Microsoft Expression Web NetObjects Fusion

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