Web Design Software input?

[StykFacE]

I know a guy that does it all day with just a text editor

One of my best friends is a professional web designer. He uses Text Editors only. He says WYSIWYG editors are crutches like Frontpage and Dreamweaver. Then again, he's a "professional" and not doing small personal sites, either.

[f700es]

One of my best friends is a professional web designer. He uses Text Editors only. He says WYSIWYG editors are crutches like Frontpage and Dreamweaver. Then again, he's a "professional" and not doing small personal sites, either.

My friend says the same thing. Something about not producing "clean code".

[FunkyFresh]

agreead. I have been doing this for 4 years now. you want clean code for search engine to like and w3cvalidator to validate. Dreamweaver is just messy as it adds alot of uneeded code

[CJJ]

Personally, I've used a few of those WYSIWYG editors, and haven't found one I really like. They all add tons of lines of code that you won't need, you'll get frustrated when your code is all over the place, and the more complex your webpage gets, the harder it is to edit/update/modify.

I absolutely hate FrontPage. It's easy enough to use, but it's also a complete mess if you go back and try to edit something manually. I've messed around with Expression Web, and that one is a little better than its predecessor, but it's still nothing great, and definitely not worth the money. Dreamweaver is much better, you can view the code it creates in a split window with the preview, which is very nice. Plus, it's pretty much the "industry standard." There are also some free / trial software editors out there that might be all you need, and they typically will have a lot of the basics that the big dogs have. You'll be missing out on database and application server integration, but most people don't need that stuff.

If you write your own code, a full-featured editor like Slickedit or Notepad++ is all you'll ever need. You'll get all the hands-on fun you're enjoying with notepad.exe and have a lot of added benefits like colored text, customizable menus, collapsible code blocks, etc. In the same vein, NetBeans IDE is very cool if you're doing something more complex than plain old HTML because it helps a lot with database integration and application servers by doing most of the hard parts for you, yet keeping you in control because you're writing most of the code. It has great tutorials and an active open-source community, so you'll benefit from custom plugins and what-not. Might be overkill, but still fun to play with.

Having said all that, you might be able to find some CMS packages out there that will take care of all the coding and stuff for you, and you just need set it up and give it the content. These can be quite overwhelming at first, since it's more of a web application than just a web page, but once you get it set up the way you want it, everything else is a breeze. You'll need a dedicated application server and will want a SQL server and PHP parser and all that, but you can set it all up without needing to write a single line of code or even understand what those acronyms stand for. I'm working on one for our company's internal website that's called Drupal, but there are a ton of other ones like Joomla, OpenCMS, PHP-Nuke, etc. Most are open source and have active support communities so plugins and tutorials are easy to find, not to mention good message boards and forums for support.

But yeah, get Notepad++.

[f700es]

+1 for Notepad++, very cool program. Have you tried MS Visual Web Developer?

[CJJ]

Have you tried MS Visual Web Developer?

No, I haven't. I don't want to get into that ASP.NET stuff, I think doing it in Java/JSP or just PHP/SQL is the way to go.

[BWells]

No, I haven't. I don't want to get into that ASP.NET stuff, I think doing it in Java/JSP or just PHP/SQL is the way to go.

Base on what i've read and recommendations from some computer engineer friends of mine he told me to shoot for PHP/SQL. I've been trying to learn some of it in down time as work but we haven't had much of that lately.

[StykFacE]

Base on what i've read and recommendations from some computer engineer friends of mine he told me to shoot for PHP/SQL. I've been trying to learn some of it in down time as work but we haven't had much of that lately.

I've heard mixed results. One of my best friend's is a very experienced web developer and he loves PHP, but he says if PHP doesn't act quick in their next release then they will be behind the times, since it's a scripting language and not an object based language or something like that.

His personal site is pretty neat actually..... http://www.lukekeith.com/ but you can't use IE, he doesn't allow it because he says it's the crappiest browser ever and lacks all kinds of support for CSS and javascript. His site is zero Flash, all jQuery and javascript.

[CJJ]

It's never a good idea to build a webpage knowing that it doesn't work for any single specific browser, especially IE because way more than half of the people on Earth use it. The same thing goes for using ASP (Microsoft Active Server Pages), which is pretty much only supported on a Windows OS because it relies heavily on ActiveX and other Microsoft-only technology. While you'll be reaching most users, you're still going to be blocking some people from seeing your page by default.

I agree with your friend using zero Flash, simply because some browsers don't support it, especially mobile devices and those pesky minority operating systems with names that end in an "X" that nerds like to use.

Java is nice because it's built to be cross-platform, but even then you'll have to worry about support for a lot of different systems that all handle stuff a little differently. And JSP (Java Server Pages) will run on most personal computers, regardless of the OS, and is pretty much going to allow you to do the same application-type websites and interactive web sites that ASP does.

Fun fact: Google recently built that Pacman browser game using JavaScript that will run on any browser, including an an iPhone. This proved that you can deliver web-based games and applications to iPhone users while bypassing the heavily-moderated iPhone store.

[StykFacE]

It's never a good idea to build a webpage knowing that it doesn't work for any single specific browser, especially IE because way more than half of the people on Earth use it.

He knows this. That's why he disabled IE for his personal site only. Plus it's only temporary. He says it will take 10+ hours just to get things to actually work in IE, not any of the animations or transitions, just getting things to literally show up. He absolutely cannot stand IE. From what he says it lacks so much support vs every other browser that IE is basically responsible for the hold up of seriously insane and awesome web development, not to mention wasting millions of dollars in labor time so programmers can create things twice - just so IE can "work". It's funny to hear him vent about it.