Web Design Software
HTML Editors

A dedicated Web Design Program vs. Notepad (or other plain text editors):

There is a legion of web designers out there who refuse to use anything but a plain text editor (like Notepad or SimpleText) to create web pages. Some of them think web designers who use visual web design programs (or WYSIWYG "what you see is what you get") are weak, sissy, baby designers because we're kinda cheating.

Screw 'em.

Joking, joking...but to these web conservatives, I say, "You don't know what you're missing." Not only are web design programs fun to use, but they're faster than handcoding & help keep your site organized, too. On top of it, using a visual editor as opposed to a text editor lets you see the design as you build. Invaluable, if you ask me.

What about Microsoft FrontPage?

While some of you may start off using Windows FrontPage (it's easy to learn and comes bundled with their Office products), you'll eventually want to move to something more robust and less goofy.

Goofy? Yeah, because the deal with Front Page is that it uses proprietary code, meaning it writes non-standard code that is only used by FrontPage. So instead of making a website that works on every server, a website made in FrontPage needs "extensions" installed on the server in order for it to work. Additionally, the code it makes is bloated (more code than necessary) and because it's proprietary, only a FrontPage user can edit it.

That said, I've put it on the list below anyway, for those of you who just want to whip out some pages fast without really having to know HTML. (hey, remember this is a site for those that get bored easily...so I still respect all you lazyasses out there).

Whatever you decide to use

Standard wisdom is that you need to learn the basics of HTML no matter what you're using. There's nothing worse than discovering your site that looks gorgeous in Internet Explorer but looks insanely messed up on Netscape, and then not know how to go about fixing it.

Web Design Programs