Building Tools

To build a website you will need an editor.

There are two categories to look at;

• WYSIWYG. This is an acronym for 'What You See Is What You Get'.
• Html/Text editor.

WYSIWYG. The two most common commercially known WYSIWYG editors are Dreamweaver and Frontpage.

This type of editor allows you put together web pages without needing any knowledge of the underlying code involved.

Using these editors you can visually lay out your page with all of the text and images and the editor will write the code; quite literally what you see is what you get.

Pros

• Easy to use
  Most of these editors work like a typical Word processor, so, if you want, there needn’t be a lot of time spent learning a new program.
• Visual Layout
  You can insert and arrange your images and text in much the same way as you can in a graphics program.
• Speed
  Unless you have been writing HTML for several years, most WYSIWYG editors will help you create Web pages faster.
• Other Features
  Most WYSIWYG HTML editors offer additional features to make your site better or increase your productivity. For example, link checking; spell checkers, JavaScript functions, DHTML tips, and more.

Cons

• In simplifying things WYSIWYG editors can produce very sloppy code.
  You have probably seen sites with ugly black lines that appear around flash images and then you are informed to click to activate and when you do nothing happens. WYSIWYG editors will produce this.
  HTML and its standards is an evolving constantly, WYSIWYG editors don't keep up with the changes, the black lines can easily be avoided if you can write HTML.
• Dreamweaver is a very complicated program with lots of features and things to learn. It also takes up a lot of system memory, which slows things down. Finally, the price is fairly high for an occasional user.
• Frontpage can create very strange HTML that is only really reliable within the Microsoft browser. Also, if you decide to use the extensions that give more features to the product, you are limited to servers that will support those codes.

For a very good alternative WYSIWYG editor try; NVU (pronounced N-View.
This is an excellent WYSIWYG editor, it produces excellent code and it's free. To get the best out of it you will have to read the documentation – the same as with Dreamweaver or Frontpage and did I mention that its free to download and use.

HTML/TEXT editors
Below are the better editors I have used and can give an honest opinion about.

An offshoot of NVU is called Kompozer – this hasn’t got as many features but is easier to learn and is also free. Excellent.
Kompozer can be downloaded here.

Notepad this is installed in all PC’s and is a basic text editor – I learned to write html using this, it was a hard slog.

1st page: a free editor with preview facility and lots of extras – this was my second editor. This too is an excellent editor and if you like it you can upgrade (buy) the pro version. I haven’t checked out the pro version so I don’t know what extra features it may have.
1st Page can be downloaded here.

Webuilder 2010 (formerly HTML Pad) – I finally succumbed to advertising and bought this, I use whatever is the latest edition this company brings out and have used it exclusively for all my web building for about four years. I feel comfortable with it and the latest edition to their range has excellent support for PHP and other scripts that I use. All in all it is probably no better than any of the above editors, I just feel comfortable with it (I paid for it so I want to get my monies worth).
Webuilder 2010 can be purchased and downloaded here.

Pros

• Faster to Edit
  For simple edits, it’s faster to make changes to a page using a text editor.
• Helps You Learn HTML
  Text editors teach you to read HTML. They often have wizards and functions to do the more common tasks (like the basic page tags), but you'll learn HTML if you use a text editor
• No Pointless HTML
  The only HTML that will be in the document will be tags that you placed there deliberately. This will help your pages download faster, as well as look leaner.

Cons

• Must Know HTML
  While most HTML text editors can help with tags and suggest attributes and so on, this is no substitute for knowing HTML. Most modern text editors have drag and drop styles such as bold and italic, but if you can't remember the code for "non-breaking space" your editor might not be able to help.
• Steeper Learning Curve
  Because you have to learn both HTML and the editor functions itself, a beginner will find a text editor more difficult to use.
• Harder to Design
  Some people find text editors more difficult to design pages in because they can't visualize how the page will look from just the HTML. Look for an editor that allows you to preview your page.