I have a friend who wants to develop a web site for his small business. He is very bright, but he does not know HTML. He wants to develop his own site so that he can make changes instantly and so that he can maintain creative control of his web site. He is looking for an HTML editor that is not terribly difficult to use, but one that also creates nice looking web pages. He would like an editor that includes templates, or a seperate source for a good template. Personally, I code all of my web sites in `vi`, so I am completely lost as to what to recommend. What would the pros here recommend?
I agree. Code horrid. You can clean it up if you use external style sheet. If he is willing to learn html I would suggest plain text editor. Code would be much cleaner that way. Shannon
FP is ok...it's really easy for beginners to use. I would never recommend it to a serious designer though. Personally, I think you should tell your friend to hire someone to design the site for him.
I started off with CoffeeCup. Now I handcode it all. I'd read up some reviews on editors and pick one that suits his position and demands. DreamWeaver has all he probably needs but might be overwhelming. Has plenty of good tutorials though. CoffeeCup HTML Editor has templates etc. too.
Frontpage does add a bunch of garbage you don't need and also screws things up some times that makes your webpage look akward in mozilla and even netscape.
IMO if you scrutinize the code output, Dreamweaver is garbage too. I did a site last night that uses a template from DW, it took a couple three hours to clean up. But there is no question, you can whip out a working nice site in no time with a little experience DW. FP is way more bloated then DW in my experience.
Get a good CMS, or content mangement system that includes a feature called TinyMCE. It gives you the option for html, but is fully XHTML compliant - and outputs quite "pretty" code. A good site I've found CMS's is opensourcecms.com. you can try them all out there and what not.