Software
There’s no shortage of software available for creating web pages. In the
early days, we just made do with tools originally designed for print. Today,
there are wonderful tools created specifically with web design in mind that
make the process more efficient. Although I can’t list every available soft-
ware release, I’d like to introduce you to the most common and proven web
design tools. Note that you can download trial versions of many of these
programs from the company websites, as listed in the “Popular Web Design
Software Links” sidebar later in this chapter.
Web page authoring
Web-authoring tools are similar to desktop publishing tools, but the end
product is a web page (an HTML file and its supporting files). These tools
provide a visual “WYSIWYG” (What You See Is What You Get, pronounced
“whizzy-wig”) interface and shortcuts that save you from typing repetitive
HTML and CSS. These tools won’t excuse you from learning HTML. Even
the most sophisticated tools won’t generate HTML as clean or well-consid-
ered as a professional writing by hand, but they can speed up the process
once you know what you’re doing.
The following are some popular web-authoring programs:
Adobe Dreamweaver. This is the hands-down industry standard due to its
relatively clean code and advanced features.
Microsoft Expression Web (Windows only). Part of Microsoft’s suite of
professional design tools, MS Expression Web boasts standards-compli-
ant code and CSS-based layouts.
Nvu (Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X). Don’t want to pay for a WYSIWYG
editor? Nvu (pronounced N-view, for “new view”) is an open source tool
that matches many of the features in Dreamweaver, and you can down-
load it for free at nvu.com.
HTML editors
HTML editors (as opposed to WYSIWYG authoring tools) are designed to
speed up the process of writing HTML by hand. They do not allow you edit
the page visually, so you need to check your work in a browser. Many profes-
sional web designers actually prefer to author HTML documents by hand,
and they tend to recommend the following:
TextPad (Windows only). TextPad is a simple and inexpensive plain-text
code editor for Windows.
Sublime Text (Window, Mac, Linux). This inexpensive and up-and-coming
text editor looks stripped down but has a lot of functionality (like color
coding and full code overviews) that developers love.