Jesus Loves You! A Prayer For You.
If you want the minimum of fuss and the maximum quality — and who doesn’t — then you’re going to need some quality software to back up your own skill. Good software means easy to use, flexible, loads of useful features and if possible, freeness.
Here I’ve reviewed the programs that I both use and have used, and give you simple advice on which you should get and where to find them.
I use Homesite for the vast majority of my HTML, CSS and JavaScript coding. It’s a text editor, so you write your code in it, save the file and then open it in your browser to see how it looks. Those of you learning using a basic editor like Notepad may like to upgrade to something like Homesite, as it speeds up the process of writing HTML code, filling in gaps for you, giving you advice on your tags, and telling you when you’ve made mistakes. The laborious parts of code writing are streamlined and automated, making for speedy development.
It also has some excellent checking features, like a HTML validator, which looks for errors in your code, spellchecker, link checker and “code-sweeper”, which cleans up your code and makes it easier to read. It even has built-in FTP. There is also a great project maker, which allows you to group pages you’ve made into sites, and then edit links site-wide etc. This is very useful for keeping your files organised.
One of the best features only reveals itself after you have created a huge website — site-wide find & replace. This means that if you need to change or fix something on every page in your site, it’s a simple task. Joy.
site: » www.adobe.com/products/homesite/
People swear by DreamWeaver, proclaiming it as the best thing ever. It is a WYSIWYG editor, and probably the best of its kind.
WYSIWYG editors used to have a bad rap among web designers. Bad examples of the genre — like Microsoft Frontpage, which is really awful — create horrendous HTML code that only works in Internet Explorer, and even then was prone to bugs. Dreamweaver is a breath of fresh air to designers who are used to warning people not to use these type of editors, myself included. It will generate valid code straight out of the gate, and has all sorts of code validation, project management, link checking facilities and other bells and whistles built in.
I like to have full control over all my code, which is why I stick with text-editors. But those of you who prefer to let the software take care of the details while you work on the larger aspects of the design will certainly like it.
site: » www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/
If you want to get your site up onto the net, a decent FTP client will save you loads of time. Cute FTP has everything automated for you. You have your local files on the left of the screen, your remote files on the right, and you just bring them across, one at a time or the whole load at once. You can save many different sites into a ’site manager’, and it will save your passwords and configurations for you.
Uploads are completed quickly, and you have full renaming and editing control over remote files. You even get a free HTML editor which, predictably, is called CuteHTML. It is a basic text-editor, a slight step up from Notepad, but it integrates well and is a nice feature.
Overall this is good. It is missing the feature to only upload files that have changed since the last transfer.
site: » www.globalscape.com
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