HTML Editors?
 

Any suggestions for some good website editors? There are so many out there and I'm looking for some suggestions for some inexpensive options.

Thanks

I use EditPlus . The W3C has a (slightly out of date but humongous) list of editors.

Yikes! I was hoping for something far more simplier, thanks for the suggestion though.

Hmmm - define simple. Something like EditPlus or BBEdit is pretty much dirt simple.

I use Dreamweaver. It is pretty easy to do simple things, then gets complicated fast. I haven't gone there yet,

What sort of website to you want to maintain?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you don't want to edit raw HTML, you just want a WYSIWYG editor to whomp up simple websites, post pictures, etc. Right?

Have you looked at the Basic Netscape Composer tool?

Notepad?
:)

Front Page Express (included in Windows 98SE) is something I continue to copy over to subsequent computers and am still using on my Windows XP. Very simple interface for very simple websites.

And free.

Notepad plus plenty of Copy/Paste on Windows. Or HTML Kit if you cannot find the code you are looking for with View Source. BBEdit on the Mac.

But then you're just encouraging Bill Gates!

If you are looking for WYSIWIG, please, please stay away from Front Page, or converting any MS Office Document to HTML - Microsoft apps produce the World's Worst HTML (c).

Did you want Windows or Mac? Apple's new iLife suite contains a nice one called iWeb. The integration with the rest of iLife is very nice.

For Windows, Nvu is okay.

I don't know how I got sucked into this, but my wonderful daughter has volunteered my services to build and maintain her soccer team website.

I have no template to work from so I get to decide what to do, but the main purpose of the website is to have a calendar of practices and tournaments, plus later in the year post some pictures on it.

YES I want a WYSIWYG tool and something very easy to use as I would like to get my daughter to maintain the website.

I looked at Dream weaver and I might be interested in it at a later date, but right now I just need to get a website built ASAP.

iWeb comes with a bunch of good looking templates. It should only take a couple hours to customize one. Also, have you thought about using one of the blog sites like blogger? That's be much easier.

If you want to build an actual site, though, you won't find anything much easier than iWeb.

back seat, do you know where you will host the website? Often times a webhosting package will include basic website building tools.

I will be hosting it at 1and1.com on my existing account (use them for email already).

The tool they offer, Webbuilder, for me, seems to be quite difficult to work with over the internet as it is very slow.

My real concern though is having the ability to build the website on my machine so I can move it to another domain when it makes sense.

I haven't tried any of these, but fromthe descriptions some sound promising...

http://pcworld.about.com/news/Nov062000id33868.htm

I use skEdit on the mac.

http://www.skti.org/skEdit.php

As much as it sucks to admit; Microsoft Frontpage really is one of the easier ones. Plus there are 1000's of free templates out there for it.

For a free editor I use the Mozilla web browser (www.mozilla.org). Call up any page on the web that appeals to you and select FILE > EDIT PAGE and it's pretty easy to modify. Handles tables, backgrounds, etc. easily in a WYSIWYG format.

Frontpage used to be truly atrocious. In fact, I have a number of consulting contracts which originated as "we tried to use Frontpage and broke our site" or "we never needed outside help before, we managed with Frontpage until..." phone calls. There were innumerable hilarious stories shared with other web developers. Frontpage 2003, however, produces significantly less bloated, less non-standard code than its predecessors. For a hobby site, it should be fine.

Too bad the same cannot be said of the HTML export features of Office. Stay away from any temptation to "Save As" from Word or Excel.

Dreamweaver is also very widely used and has a very large user community that contributes plugins and templates. The MX 2004 edition is also a big improvement over the slow/buggy MX 2002 edition. It may be overkill for a site that consists of a half-dozen, mostly static pages, however.

Avoid Adobe GoLive.

For the calendar, I'm using Airset for a number of websites. It's a collaborative groupware kind of thing that allows you (or any other member of the group) to easily enter appointments, embed them in a website as an RSS feed or in an iframe, email or SMS your cellphone the day before, automatically googlemap your locations, and probably more stuff I haven't figured out yet. It really beats the heck out of maintaining an HTML calendar yourself.

Here's an example of it embedded in a website: http://cantabileboulder.org/?page_id=25.

Ultraedit works really well for me. Nice interface with a tabbed windows makes it easy to switch between different open files...

vi

:D

Personally I use Notepad and Dreamweaver, but I learned on AWeb Developer by Gary Hodder.

WOW - Airset is great, wonder how they make money!

So far I have found AWeb Developer excellent and easy to use :)

I'm a bit embarrassed to admit it, but I use an old version of MS Frontpage (97). It does the job for my basic HTML needs.

I've used all of these editors; making websites and web applications is my job. With that in mind:

The Microsoft haters of the world will steer you away from Frontpage, but this attitude seems to miss the point. As another poster has already suggested, the newer versions of the program produce much more conformant code. For 99% of hobbyist sites and 99% of hobbyist applications, they Will Not Care about the esoterica of W3C compliance, and Frontpage will do the things they need it to.

I use Dreamweaver 8 and it would be my recommendation for the broadest range of uses and skillsets. Unlike Frontpage, it doesn't really try to supply you with a template, but it is a good, easy-to-use visual editing environment that doesn't disconnect you too much from code.

For a hobbyist, stay away from Ultraedit, Homesite, and other code-only environments. I make a lot of my best sites in Visual Studio.NET -- a ~$1000 programming environment -- but there's no way in hell I'd recommend something like it for hobbyist/amateur use. These expert systems are made for speed and control, not for ease-of-use for newbie applications.

-KF

You have got to be joking!!!!

I hate the stuff. When working for an ISP and getting website support questions it was *always* Frontpage errors.

I use Dreamweaver at work on my Mac.

I'd love to have Homesite (Macromedia) but sadly it's only available for PC and I saw the light 3 years ago.

Mac users, get iLife 06 and a .mac account. You're limited to half a dozen templates in iWeb but t is fairly OK.

I hate Steve Jobs for iWeb. He killed my line of work with that. *sigh*

/E

Hang on, Homesite worked fine for WYSIWYG for me. It's brilliant on code. Now, having moved away from PC and on to the Mac's I'm a Dreamweaver user too. DW8 is brilliant!

It's over 6 years ago I used Frontpage. At first thought it was the bee's knees until I knew different. With Fireworks and Dreamweaver I gained a whole different understanding on what can be done.

/E - am also in the web industry.

I used dreamweaver before and needed a free alternative and came across this:

http://www.nvu.com/

You may want to look into, it worked ok for me when I used it but didn't scrutinize very heavily on how good the output HTML was.

And their IE specific sites will break in other browsers, and they'll have no idea why, or even how to begin to troubleshoot the problem.

I agree, they don't need to know about the esoterica of standards compliance; their tools ought to protect them from it.

Have you considered using one of the many online web building sites? Almost any host or domain name reseller has a website builder module.

Despite their crass commercials, I like godaddy.com for domain names and administration. I've never used their website builder, but have faith that it would be a lot simpler than anything previously mentioned.

(Edit: I just took a quick look at "Web Site Tonight" at godaddy.com and I think this is exactly what you need for the site you describe. Surely they will have a soccer template and it will be so well done, you'll find yourself building websites for all your daughter's activities!)

Your such a good dad - :D

how about emacs? :)

The request was for an editor, not a religion . . . ;)

ARGH! I really liked the AWEB program, but I can't buy a registration code for it! Suggestions?

google page creator?
 

I noticed this yesterday ... followed a link from google labs to find it.

beta or maybe even pre-beta? and somewhat restrictive as it creates your pages on <gmail-name>.googlepages.com, but some may want to give it a shot.

http://pages.google.com/

Oh well, never mind. It takes you to a page where you can enter your email addy when they are ready to give out more accounts.

-David

Which makes no sense, given that you've already signed into your gmail account.

shameless plug:
http://www.htmlcenter.com
end shameless plug

FYI, It is amazing that basically the WYSIWYG market has dropped from 100's of tools to really just Dreamweaver in the lead.

The gating factor is access to the page builder, not a gmail account.

-David

How to tell which HTML Editor created a website?
 

Is it possible to tell what editor a person used to create a website?