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Best Web Authoring Application? 140

Posted by Cliff from the beyond-text-editors dept.
NotHereOrThere asks: "I want to setup a small business web site and I'm trying to choose a web authoring application. I'm a software developer, so technical complexity doesn't scare me, but I've never developed for the web other than some very simple HTML pages. My main requirements are ease of use and presentation quality. What do Slashdot readers recommend? Any recommendations for a hosting service?"
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Best Web Authoring Application? More

Best Web Authoring Application?

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  • WebGUI (Score:2, Informative)

    by Pahroza ( 24427 )
    Check out WebGUI [plainblack.com].

    It's open source, configurable, easy to maintain, and easy to learn.

  • Recommendations: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Southpaw018 ( 793465 ) * on Friday June 17, 2005 @02:23PM (#12844301) Journal
    Are you willing to hand-code your pages? I recommend you do - it's the only way to ensure that your site is absolutely standards-compliant (get the Web Developer extension for Firefox. It's a big help). I use Notepad++ (http://sourceforge.net/projects/notepad-plus [sourceforge.net]) because I feel it's a nice, simple, effective editor.

    As for hosts, I highly, highly recommend Resiware (http://hosting.resiware.com/ [resiware.com] Their prices can't be beat and their hosting is rock solid amazing. See the link in my sig for the lil site we have hosted with them now.
    • ummm...you don't have a sig!

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Recommendations: (Score:4, Informative)

        by zbuffered ( 125292 ) on Friday June 17, 2005 @02:45PM (#12844655)
        I only know a few professional web developers, but they all use Dreamweaver. I took over one of their projects, so I started using it myself. I have to say, it's probably the most complete web development app out there. I've been using it for a year and have only scratched the surface of it's capabilities. It presents itself with a simple interface to begin with, and gets as complicated as you like. It's also got the best CSS editor I've ever used.

        If someone knows of a better CSS editor (and by better I mean easier for newbies; I teach a class on web design to beginners), let me know!

        • I took over one of their projects, so I started using it myself.

          It's a good thing that you started to use the product, because you'd hate it if you had to edit by hand the pages it 'creates'. My advice...

          Get your self a dual lcd setup (two 17" screens and a dual video card will cost just over $500). A good CSS book like 'CSS the definitive Guide' and your choice of text editors. Code on on screen and reload in a web browser on the other. If you are doing anything besides strait HTML/JavaScript/CSS c

          • With synergy (see .sig) I have a six monitor setup, if you include this crappy iMac. My main box has dual 18" LCDs (HA! Had to one-up you didn't I?), one in portrait mode.

            I'll look into Eclipse. Thanks!
            • My main box has dual 18" LCDs (HA! Had to one-up you didn't I?), one in portrait mode.(Swing and a miss!)
              Actually, I have two 19" Samsung 930b monitors. I just mentioned 17"ers because you can get them fairly 'cheap' these days. They're still fairly new, and I am just getting used to having them. One odd thing that I never thought of with the dual screen setup, is the amount of 'mouse travel' to get from one screen to the next.
          • Amen. I'm the summer guy in a Dreamweaver shop, and I'm the only one who codes by hand. The code they've been creating generally validates, but thank $DIETY I don't have to touch it - they're doing a site redesign right now, but they're not re-coding from scratch. Instead, they're copying old pages, then modifying 'em - which results in horrible code (not just bad variables, which is obnoxious if you hand code, but classes that are identical, etc.). You don't really need a dual setup or $500 to code by
        • DW is OK but it's really frustrating as it has alot of things missing. Number 1 has to be a reasonable rendering engine. I design standards compliant XHTML / CSS with quite a bit of PHP. Even allowing for the PHP none of the pages look at all like any current rendering engine ... this is the latest version (MX2004)!

          It doesn't even have PHP syntax checking! Every other text editor does code highlighting. I need bracket highlighting and syntax checking ... like JEdit or PHP Editor. DW often screws up on the
        • "If someone knows of a better CSS editor (and by better I mean easier for newbies; I teach a class on web design to beginners), let me know!"

          Try looking for a mozilla extension (to the html editor) -- I think it's 'cascades' but I might be wrong. Anyway, that's got a fairly nice CSS editor (handles multiple internal or external stylesheets, has pages for specifying borders, colours, images, text, etc., and will still allow you to use properties that it doesn't know about.

          Obviously I wouldn't recommend
        • I teach a beginner class too - we make 'em code it by hand...ha ha...suckers.

          Joking aside though, we've found that making them code things by hand gives a better understanding of how stuff actually works. We used frontpage a little while back, and found that the students were lacking a very basic understanding of how web stuff worked. We'd get kids coming in asking things like "where are my pictures?" and you'd ask if they uploaded them and their answer would be "why? they're right on the screen there"
      • DW is such a piece of crap. The CSS support is appalling.

        Who the hell wants to see: .class1 {font-size:8pt} .class2 {font-size:8pt} .class3 {font-size:8pt} .class4 {font-size:8pt;color:red} .class5 {font-size:8pt;background-color:Navy;}

        in their code. The text editor in DW is okay, but if all you need is a text editor, install Homesite + off the CD instead. Better editor with a much lighter footprint. DW can consume as much ram as Photoshop at times.
      • Also, give Zend PHP Studio a try. I love it. Find it way better than DW, and there's Linux support for it, seeing as it's written in Java. It supports editing over ftp like DW does. The function insight is better than DW's IMO.

      • Re:Recommendations: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by dubl-u ( 51156 ) *
        Bah. I'm a huge fan of Dreamweaver.

        I know some good people swear by it, but the thing that makes me crazy about apps like Dreamweaver and GoLive is that a lot of alleged designers use them as an excuse to remain ignorant of the underlying technology.

        When I asked one designer to clean up her voluminous and chaotic markup and to fix the browser-related issues I had noticed, she told me that she was "a web designer, not a web programmer", and that she didn't really understand HTML and CSS so well. I rolled

    • Re:Recommendations: (Score:4, Interesting)

      by captnitro ( 160231 ) * on Friday June 17, 2005 @02:37PM (#12844528)
      I was going to mod you up, but I'll comment.

      I say: if you're going for standards compliance, at this point, you almost *have* to hand-code your pages. If you're running Windows, go for TopStyle [bradsoft.com]. It includes HTML Tidy integration and a number of other features.

      The problem is, if you're doing more than simple HTML -- and you plan to keep it updated by hand -- these days, Dreamweaver and similar products just boil down to fancy text editors.
      Their CSS features are far slower than simply hand-coding the tags, unlike if you were doing this in 1996, where bold and italic and colors would cut it. Dreamweaver, for example, seems to have a horrid understanding of CSS and XHTML, that is to say, you can hand-code, or you can use its "features", but don't plan on both, it's a headache.

      I use to use Fireworks for a lot of "automated" web graphics, now I hand-code everything and use Fireworks for the design elements, but no table-based graphics. Web authoring has become so, well, complex -- it's not just HTML any more -- that no product made for the Old Web really cuts it any more than notepad. I'd die to have a program like Fireworks that would export my raw graphics as properly coded CSS, that compiled layers into divs properly, and that -- say I used a rounded corner with 75% transparency -- would write out the CSS3 tags for corners and opacity and have the code degrade properly for browsers that don't support it. Unfortunately, this requires more of a web-document compiler than generator, something more intelligent, that just doesn't exist right now. But someday.
      • Lot's of apps include tidy integration, I think this is in Quanta and Bluefish and it's certainly in JEdit (my current choice).

        With JEdit I get suggestions from tidy everytime I save a file.
    • But are there any good applications for helping you do this. For programmers there are plenty of great applications that will help you manage your code, while still letting you hand code yourself. Do this really exist for the web? Seems like there would be a market for them.
      • BBEdit sounds like what you're looking for.
    • The offer on Resiware's site seemed to good to be true (unlimited storage and bandwidth for $12/month). So I googled them and came up with this page [twopercentco.com] noting that they got out of the hosting business. Do you know anything about that?
  • I'd suggest using php and an sql database alongside xml/css. Professional, relativly low bandwidth, and sexy/lightweight. But that's just me. If you felt a bit sadomasochistic I suppose you could use IIS and asp.NET because if it's not .NET you're nto conforming to the microsoft group think and that's baaad very bad. All kiding aside, I've used asp and I hate it but perhaps it has practical applications, I've just yet to see them. Find what works for what you need and go with that regardless of what's "cool
    • You want him to write his own web authoring system in PHP and store his files in a database instead of on disk?
    • "IIS and asp.NET because if it's not .NET you're nto conforming to the microsoft group think"

      I'm sure that was just an uneducated low-blow/joke, but really ASP.NET and C# are very nice to work with and can easily be run on *nix with Mono.

  • Applications (Score:2, Insightful)

    by LouCifer ( 771618 )
    I use HomeSite [macromedia.com] and have since its inception from Bradbury. Great software.

    If you prefer something prettier, you can try Dreamweaver [macromedia.com].

    I believe there are trials of both available.

  • NVU (Score:3, Interesting)

    by forsetti ( 158019 ) on Friday June 17, 2005 @02:30PM (#12844412)
    I've just started using NVU 1.0PR, and so far, I really like it. It is extremely simple, and generates very good (HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 compliant) code. It won't do anything too fancy for you, but supports templates, javascript events, and external style sheets. I'd suggest giving it a whirl.
  • Seriously, I know of no fancy graphical editor that can turn out a decent XHTML web page with style sheet. My usual test is to try to create a simple page with a heading, a few paragraphs, and a bulleted list, styled to taste. You'd be amazed how many supposed web editors fail that test--can't produce a heading, can't put together a complete HEAD element, can't apply CSS to lists, and so on.

    So, get a content management system, and build your XHTML and CSS by hand. If you want, you can then use a web-based
    • thank you. Why are people always trying to use some fancy wysiwyg crap? My wife teaches dreamweaver classes to her fellow employees at apple, but wont let them use anything but the editor.

      it's not like (x)?html isn't human readable guys
      • Why are people always trying to use some fancy wysiwyg crap?

        Because lots of ordinary people want to maintain web sites, and for ordinary people XHTML and CSS are a bit beyond them.

        I wouldn't have recommended hand-coding with vim for an ordinary person, but the guy specifically said he's a programmer, so...

  • Why not an OSS CMS? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gtrubetskoy ( 734033 ) * on Friday June 17, 2005 @02:37PM (#12844522)

    Why not try an Open Source Content Management System like Plone [plone.org] or Mambo [mamboserver.com]? Being a technical guy you will probably find that the only way to produce a good looking site is to do it by hand, learning the intricacies of HTML/CSS and latest graphics tricks, and that's a lot more work than meets the eye. That's why those things are nice - they give you a more or less professional look to start with.

    Oh, and for hosting I recommend OpenHosting [openhosting.com], of course!

    • You make a good point.

      Mambo is a good LAMP solution.

      Plone require Zope, but once you get past that, a very good solution as well. Actually for that matter, I think AngelineCMS has the Plone Look and Feel, and its a LAMP CMS. But for that matter, just do a Wiki, like MediaWiki the project that runs WikiPedia.

    • Re:Why not an OSS CMS? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by js7a ( 579872 )
      Beginners might be better off making html in notepad or an HTML editor like the one that comes bundled with Mozilla than a big system.

      But I don't object to making them read the manual of such programs while they are thinking about which one to buy.

    • At the risk of turning this into a CMS flamefest, you should check out Drupal (http://drupal.org/ [drupal.org]). Not only is it a top-of-the-line Open Source CMS, but customizing it and creating your own modules is more straight-forward and more powerful than with Mambo. Mambo gives you a better package out of the box, though, as long as you're trying to build a site that it comes pre-configured to handle.

      Drupal is the base for spreadfirefox.com as well as many other sites. It's a great base from which to build many th

  • Do your work outside of a box (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Enrico Pulatzo ( 536675 ) on Friday June 17, 2005 @02:41PM (#12844587)
    The first thing you should probably do is pickup a copy of The Non-Designer's Design Book [amazon.com]. It'll give you a great head start on typography and the use of space and save you some considerable face later.

    After that, what I usually do is take a piece of paper and draw out your initial ideas and from there, use a trial version of Dreamweaver to codify your design. Then save it as a template and purchase a copy of Macromedia's Contribute to make pages and keep them up-to-date.

    If coding by hand's more your style (it is for me), I'd still highly recommend using Contribute to keep your pages up-to-date. It's easy to use and (more importantly) is hard to royally screw up things with.

    For inspiration, look at sites you like, but realize that flashy isn't necessarily the best user experience.

    Good Luck.
  • vim (syntax on, syntax html)
    • Ghey Ghey. You dont sound elite when someone invariably sais 'Vim' or 'Use Notepad', you just sound like an elitist ass. Dreamweaver is great, lately I find myself using Eclipse IDE with the CFEclipse plugin, and I am loving it. With the proper plugins it does any language you want with code suggest, color coding, shrinking comments or code sections (I LOVE this part, and missed it from Homesite), and it runs nice on any machine I have loaded it on (did I mention its free?) The only downside to Eclipse v
  • Notepad.

  • It depends... (Score:3, Informative)

    by brontus3927 ( 865730 ) <edwardra3@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Friday June 17, 2005 @02:44PM (#12844630) Homepage Journal
    If your using Windows or OS X, I would recommend Macromedia Dreamweaver MX. You can download a 30 day trial here [macromedia.com]. Also available in trial form is Studio MX which has Dreamweaver, Flash, and a suite of other Macromedia products.

    Another route if you are running Windows 2000 or XP Professional is to download Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express 2005 beta 2, available for free download [microsoft.com]. MS VWDE2005 is bundled with Microsoft SQL Server Express, which is a free, stripped down version of MS SQLServer. This route may be a better idea if you are going to be building a website built on asp and SQL Server hosted on a Windows Server. Visual Web Developer Express will run on XP Home, but SQL Server Express will not. It has built in support for an Oracle DB, but not for MySQL.

    Before choosing a host, decide what language you are going to script in. If you are going to use asp and/or .net you will need a Windows host. Most hosts will only offer php on linux servers.

  • Drupal (Score:3, Informative)

    by tomcio.s ( 455520 ) on Friday June 17, 2005 @02:46PM (#12844661) Homepage Journal
    http://durpal.org/ [durpal.org]

    very vibrant community, many plugins, breeze to deploy and maintain.

    I currently run my site on it. The initial setup and deployment took a little bit less than an hour.

    http: // neversayforever [dot] homeip [dot] net /

  • My Reccomendations (Score:4, Insightful)

    by infernalC ( 51228 ) <matthew@mellon.google@com> on Friday June 17, 2005 @02:47PM (#12844690) Homepage Journal
    Hosting - canaca.ca
    - SSH, FTP, PHP, ASP, IMAP/POP/SMTP, 10 gigs bw, cheap

    Editing - emacs, tidy
    - no more powerful editor out there
    - you already said you weren't scared;
    we'll see if you should be :-)
    - use tidy to clean your markup

    Language
    - Do all you new pages in XHMTL 1.0 Strict and
    style them with CSS2.
    - Server-side script in PHP.
    - Avoid client-side scripts.

    Browser
    - Get Firefox.
    - Test in IE and Firefox.
    - VALIDATE!!! validator.w3.org

    - my 2 cents

    • I would avoid PHP for server sides scripts. Python is a much nicer language. Ruby on Rails gets a lot of good press from programmers I tend to trust. (I have never used Ruby) PHP is just painful. It works and has support for some of the things you need, but it falls down quick if you want a nice language.

      Personal opinion, of course, but I have come to hate PHP. I think you will too, so I recommend you stay away, or at least evaluate the alternatives first.

    • I'm not going to enter an editor flamewar; I use vi, but gvim is nicer. The main thing is to find one which supports syntax highlighting, it'll help you find that tag you left open which is breaking your page...

      Client side scripts aren't bad provided their loss doesn't hamper the site. For instance, input validation prior to submission to the server saves time and your bandwidth, even though you should be checking at the server as well.

      As for browsers, validate in Opera, Safari and Konqueror if you c

  • Linux web authoring app? Quanta! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Shazow ( 263582 ) <{andrey.petrov} {at} {shazow.net}> on Friday June 17, 2005 @02:56PM (#12844835) Homepage
    For some strange reason, everybody thus far decided to suggest numerous windows applications.

    Well, I use Quanta Plus (http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/ [kdewebdev.org]).

    It's an excellent environment once you get it configured the way you like it. It has four MDI modes (like GIMP's every-window-for-itself, or all in one window, and different styles, etc), it has a colour picker (which sooo many web authoring apps lack), it supports dozens and dozens of syntaxes (scripting, programming, markup, etc.) and it's excellent in terms of project organization.

    It's made for KDE, though. So you might have to get a few dependencies here and there (- understatement if you don't run KDE). But I feel it's worth it (albeit I DO run KDE).

    I use is solely for source editing, but it also has a visual editor. I don't know how competent the visual editor is, but the source editor is excellent. It has autocomplete and all that jazz.

    I never really got into vi and emacs and all that, but I think this is much better for the task at hand.

    - shazow
  • Since you don't know, DON'T USE FRONTPAGE!!!

    I've been using Dreamweaver since version 1.0, excellent program. I actually don't use it anymore, I hand code everything, with UltraEdit.

    Web Development: Macromedia Dreamweaver
    Content Management: Macromedia Contribute
    XML/XSLT: XML Spy
    CSS: TopStyle Pro
    General Programming: UltraEdit
    Language: PHP
    Database: MySQL
    Server: Linux/Apache

    • Re: Cat got your tongue? (something important seem (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 17, 2005 @03:28PM (#12845324)

      <HTML>
      <HEAD>
      <TITLE>
      <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">>
      <META NAME="ProgId" CONTENT="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
      Response to vbrtrmn
      </TITLE>
      </HEAD>
      <BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="BLACK" LINK="BLUE" VLINK="RED">
      <DIV CLASS="slashdotresponse">
      <DIV CLASS="quote">
      & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp;
      <FONT NAME="Arial" SIZE="12pt">
      <I>
      <FONT NAME="Arial" SIZE="12pt">
      Since you don't know, DON'T USE FRONTPAGE!!!
      </I>
      </FONT>
      & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp;
      </DIV>
      </DIV>
      <DIV>
      <DIV>
      <DIV>
      </DIV>
      </DIV>
      </DIV>
      <DIV CLASS="quote">
      <FONT NAME="Arial" SIZE="12pt">
      <P CLASS="response">
      & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp;
      Why not?
      & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp;
      </P<
      </FONT>
      </DIV>
      <DIV>
      <DIV>
      <DIV>
      </DIV>
      </DIV>
      </DIV>
      </BODY>
      </HTML>

  • Everyone has their preference... IDE's, Languages, platforms. Mine's no better than anyone else's but I like it, and I think others will to.

    I use Dreamweaver, then I immediatly installed Impakt (interakt.ro.)

    It's not free by any stretch, but it lets me create PHP websites in record time. Spend your time tweaking your styles and layouts, not calculating tr's/td's by hand.

    It uses ADODB, so the PHP that it generates can be used on just about any database. But to get you started, MySQL, Oracle, MSSQL, Post

  • IANPWD (I am not a professional web developer), but I see no reason not to use Emacs. For everything. Start out by making it your start-up shell, and go from there.

  • Geeklog (Score:3, Informative)

    by molnarcs ( 675885 ) <csabamolnar@gm a i l . com> on Friday June 17, 2005 @03:01PM (#12844913) Homepage Journal
    You might want to use some CMS - take a look at opensourcecms.org, where you can try out some.

    My favorite is geeklog, which has medium complexity, and it is easy to develop your own plugins for it. It has a good user management interface, and you can do almost anything with the built in static page plugin (a misnomer, for the pages are just as dynamic as the rest), like running php scripts for instance. Also, geeklog is written with security as a priority (even though you need register globals on). An example for a geeklog site is groklaw.net - a pretty good reference, no?

    My own tftpanel.hu [tftpanel.hu] runs on geeklog, as well as another site [unideb.hu] I maintain. Hosting requirements are pretty good for geeklog: mysql (if you have access to only one database, that's fine) and php support, plus works on windows as well.

    There are lots of CMS out there, ranging from pivot (simple) to typo3 (overkill) - so you might look at them at opensourcecms.org before you decide.

    • I was looking forward to trying the site you mentioned, but unfortunately I was redirected several times and ended up at OpenCMS's site. This is a bit frustrating, as I've been trying to choose a CMS for my own site, but have no idea what criteria I should be using to evaluate them.

      Does anyone have suggestions?

  • Thumbs down to DreamWeaver MX (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Several other posters have suggested Dreamweaver as the best. I'd like to counter that.

    I'm primarity a C++ application developer who one in a while is tasked with making a website (or rather the frontend to a application I'm developing). Having zero graphic design skills, I tried Dreamweaver.

    At first I loved it for its WYSIWYG capabilty; the code it produces is relatively clean. For a while it was great. Then I started doing more complex CSS stuff, like floating divs, etc. That's where Dreamweaver fa

  • How about two? (Score:3, Informative)

    by wolf31o2 ( 778801 ) on Friday June 17, 2005 @03:20PM (#12845195)

    Windows: Dreamweaver

    Linux: Bluefish

    Personally, I'm not one for WYSIWYG editors, but I've heard good things about Dreamweaver, and was impressed with it the once or twice I took it up and used it. The first time I used Bluefish, I fell in love with it. It is a fairly simple interface, and can help you once you start to learn what you're doing, without being braindead and making asinine assumptions for you, which is definitely appreciated.

  • Really, you can't do web development without one of the two. GUI's will only slow you down in the long run, the code will be crap, and you will spend hours and hours debugging some piddly error introduced by a WYSIWIG editor that threw some crap in because it thought it was a good idea.
    • I half agree with you. I generally use NVu, Emacs and TopStyle Pro [www.bradburysoftware] (running under wine with the help of winetools). A couple of posters have mentioned Bluefish, so that's compiling right now (Gentoo).

      Generally, I'll use NVu to rough out a page, then switch to TopStyle to work out how I want the CSS to work, do the bulk of the coding in Emacs, then back to TopStyle to polish up the CSS. So far, I haven't found an equal to TopStyle for CSS. Especially the immediate feedback. NVu's CSS is painfully modal by

  • Quanta Plus (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jregel ( 39009 ) on Friday June 17, 2005 @03:35PM (#12845404) Homepage
    I have developed a fairly small PHP/MySQL driven site using Quanta under KDE. As an HTML editor it is extremely polished. The ability to publish a project to a website works very well enabling me to synchronise my local copy with the web server.

    It doesn't have any problems maintaining source formatting either, and will assist in the generation of XHTML compliant code.

    The developers are working on making Quanta Plus a Dreamweaver killer and at the moment, I think it's one of the best Linux applications going.
  • What you need is a CMS! Mambo [mamboserver.com] is very easy to install, easy to learn and does all you need.
  • I'm currently using Nvu [nvu.com] and HTML Tidy [sourceforge.net] to build my sites.

    I'm tired of using non-standard tags and I'm also tired of making webpages with VI so I've started using Nvu. It's a true WYSIWYG editor but since it's not production-grade yet I run the pages through HTML Tidy to clean up the excessive tags and markups that might get left behind in Nvu.

    It has a few nice tools and since it's Gecko-based it renders in Firefox exactly like it does in the editor.

    For my javascript and php work I try really hard to use
  • I am looking for an affordable and reliable Virtual Private Server/User Mode Linux host. I am using jvds.com currently, but have found that when I'm abroad their site is slow. Even when I'm in the states it's slow.

    Any recommendations?

    Thanks!
  • You could use InfoStructure (http://www.mind.net/ [mind.net] and use FrontPage! :)
  • is probably the best way to ensure standards compliance and get what you really want.

    as for hosting, i use www.dailyrazor.net and they're really good. their support is amazing, people will respond to your emails at all hours of the night and on weekends, and they go the extra mile to figure out problems (even if they're not their own - they helped me find a problem with hibernate). my site(s) are all hosted from them, you can see them at www.terrbear.org.

    good luck!

  • Whatever you do, no matter what, AVOID MANAGED.COM.

    I've never had such downtime, or such aweful support than my couple months using managed.com

    Durring my time there, our leased server was down more than up, we got ignored for days on end, and lost all the data we had on the server. No chance ever for backups, since the machien was never up.

    If ylou need further proof, google it up. I am not alone in my pain.
  • First off I'm assuming this is for an externally visible business web-site and not some intranet thing or personal site (if it is then ignore this post).

    Seriously it's better to pay someone to do this. I'm a developer too and I have even done serious web-site development in the past. It is tempting to do it yourself. However, it's so much easier and nicer just to pay someone else that actually spends a lot of time caring about what a site should look like, using modern design, and testing on all platfor
  • If you're going to be doing web app development you'll want an IDE that supports your chosen technology... like Eclipse [eclipse.org] or something.

    If you're doing more or less HTML/JavaScript and some light PHP/JSP/ASP/CF/whatever it depends on how much money you want to spend.

    If you don't want to spend any money check these out [sourceforge.net].

    If you want to spend money I recommend Dreamweaver [macromedia.com] if you don't want to know what's going on or HomeSite [macromedia.com] if you do want to know what's going on.

  • I haven't seen anyone mention this one yet, but I have used GoLive on MacOS and MacOS X for several years with good luck.

    http://www.adobe.com/products/golive/main.html [adobe.com]

  • Choices... (Score:2, Informative)

    by paploo ( 238300 )
    I prefer to write all my CSS and HTML by hand when I can. I always get clean, managable code that does exactly what I want. The only problem is that as a site grows bigger and more complex, some of the commercial offerings help you to manage the intricate connections and automate the link validation for you. It is also nice to have WYSIWYG editing on occasion, usually when I can't remember how to do something I haven't done in awhile.

    For straight-up hand editing I use SubEthaEdit, which is a really clev

  • My opinion (Score:2, Insightful)

    by SocialEngineer ( 673690 )
    As a person who has been doing web dev contracts for about a year or so now, I would suggest you hand-code all your websites in a simple text editor (w/ code highlighting - in Windows I use Notepad2, in Linux I use Nedit).

    I taught a 13 year old how to code websites by hand. We got through basic HTML in a few weeks, and he wasn't having any serious problems. He was able to use tables and organize his layout in a clean and efficient manner - We didn't have time to tackle CSS and standards compliance, but
  • Well, I'm not as seasoned as many who post here, and I have to admit that I used to be a dreamweaver evangelist. Although I never really enjoyed having closing tags written out for me when I type, nor do I appreciate waiting MINUTES for the application to start up, and, to be completely honest, I've never used the built in ftp software, ever. After years of Dreamweaver web development, I've switched to the much simpler Notepad++( http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm [sourceforge.net] ). It seems that as my conf
  • Text Editor (Ultra Edit on Windoze)
    Mozilla (the firefox kind)
    Dev Edge Sidebar [lachy.id.au] Personally, I don't wysiwyg. Code is simply too bulky. Better to code the hard way. You will really know how to code that way anyhow. Throw in Mozilla Web Developer ext and you are laughing :] JsD IE == WhyE
  • i use freepgs, its a one off payment of $3 for the basic service, which comes with mysql, php, ruby support.

    The support is great, i once emailed them asking if it would be possible to install mod_ruby and they emailed back very soon after telling me its installed and i just have to log in and enable it.
  • I use this tool to do a lot of work. It is very flexible in that it allows you to split the graphical and code parts so whatever you need to do you can edit and go back and forth with. It also integrates well with backend databases for testing and can help with some of the scripting languages as well. However, you can't program in ASP.NET, ASP, Cold Fusion, PHP, etc. with Dreamweaver if you don't know how to do it to begin with.

    As with other programs Dreamweaver also has an integrated ftp function and al

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