©Where you see a dash (-) in a column, that means the web editor concerned is probably not suitable for persons covered in that column.
More notes, for the beginner or would-be professional, appear after the following table.
| Computing : Web Design | |||
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| Best Web Editors Compared |
| All web editors are incredibly powerful. Without exception. But, as yet, no single editor is the best for all levels of user. Our © Where you see a dash (-) in a column, that means the web editor concerned is probably not suitable for persons covered in that column. |
The reason for dashes could be cost, complexity or technical. For example, Microsoft Word scores highly
as a simple starter tool (8/10 in the second column), but gets nothing in every other column
because you cannot learn clean HTML from it nor readily produce high standard web pages with
it. A score of 5 out of 10 in any column may be regarded as an 'average' mark. Be
warned, if you are intending to teach yourself free-style web page design from scratch, it can become a time-consuming
passion and may require years of indulgence to become proficient at producing impressive, cohesive
designs. More notes, for the beginner or would-be professional, appear after the following table. |
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| Beginner | Would-be Professional | |||
| If you have never tried to create a nice web page off-line in your
life, ready for uploading to your own webspace, but would like to try, you need to be looking
down the '"Absolute Beginners" column in the table above. You may already have
Microsoft FrontPage, or Netscape's Composer, on your computer - in which case you should
kick off with either of those because it won't cost you anything. However, if you do not
currently have those or any other specialist web editor of any kind on your computer, but you
do have Microsoft Word, then begin practising using Word - because that won't cost you
anything either! The great thing about starting with a familiar program like Word, for a raw beginner, is that you can immediately knock together a specimen page, complete with text, graphics, images and links, which Word then allows you to save as an HTML file. Double-click that file and you will see the results straightaway, as an actual web page, in Internet Explorer, without needing to upload to a server and without the steep learning curve that all the specialist editors incur. Dabbling with Word in this way will soon tell you if you have the necessary acumen and patience for designing web pages - before you risk shelling out hundreds of pounds on a top-end editor. For the beginner who knows absolutely nothing about HTML, and has no real wish to learn it (not recommended), but still wants to knock out some passable, personal pages, quickly and easily, then Web Artist (formerly Web Studio) would be your main choice in the above chart. There are, literally, dozens of similar, pure drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editors of the Web Artist type. Four of them appear in our table (marked by a *1 in the first column), including top-of-the-range (but trickiest of all) Net Objects Fusion. Web Artist is probably as good as they manage to get from a purely beginner's point-of-view, and it costs just peanuts in comparison. Or there is Web Builder which costs nothing at all and packs a wicked punch for something that fits on half a floppy disk. You would require version 2.7.4 as that was the final FULL freeware version. It is somewhat rare to come by now but, if you download version 2.7.2 from Tucows, you will actually get 2.7.4 (as at 22.5.06). There are a number of downsides with all the *1 type of strict-WYSIWYG editors. Which stems from the fact that usually they can only produce fixed-width pages (so you can't have fluid, flowing text), and the pages are usually bound up in a special folder with a proprietary extension that prevents satisfactory access to the HTML code for manual fine-tuning. But that's probably not going to bother a raw beginner. Nevertheless, rather than actually paying for an inflexible WYSIWYG editor, a beginner would probably be better off paying that little bit extra in order to start off with Namo as a stepping stone. Or try the free KompoZer (much improved, and moved up our table, at 9.2.08 - also see footnote). If and when you advance to a more flexible tool, however, like the still-available FrontPage, or Dreamweaver, you will never want to go back, never. |
Ultimately, you will need to be working with a versatile tool like Microsoft's former flagship editor, FrontPage, and/or Dreamweaver. Our top tip is to start with an older version of either tool (providing you are still using a pre-Vista computer). To produce top quality pages to HTML 4 and CSS1 standard, you don't necessarily need anything higher than FrontPage 2000 or Dreamweaver 4. You can hunt down those versions for a fraction of the cost of their current equivalents. And cost would not be the only benefit either. Being old, those versions are much smaller and, hence, a lot faster. They were also better to work with because they used floating dialogs and floating help files, meaning you never lost any workspace to those inflexible docking dialogs or task panes used in the later versions. You would need higher versions only if you wanted to venture into database driven websites at a serious level and/or if you were running Vista and there was a compatibility issue with older versions. FrontPage was, in fact, a powerful easy-to-master package which, until its eventual discontinuation in 2007 when MS Office 2003 was replaced with Office 2007, completely dominated the low-end consumer market for web page creation. Once a FrontPage user had positioned
and customised the toolbars to suit their every need, and configured its Page Options to "Preserve existing HTML", FrontPage was actually better than Dreamweaver for doing some of the more mundane tasks involved in constructing web pages. Though not for all tasks! And therein lies the rub with web editors. Despite all their impressive power, for some reason not one of them, not even Dreamweaver, is perfect in every respect. In the days before the appearance of FrontPage's expensive successor (called Expression Web) in 2007, we used to say that professional web designers who used a PC, rather than a Mac, were in the best position because they could have both Dreamweaver and FrontPage installed on the same PC, and could switch between the two tools according to which was easier or faster for a particular constructional task on an individual page. That was what we used to recommend, not either or, but both. But Mac users were, of course, always denied the option of Windows' FrontPage, and had to stick doggedly to Dreamweaver. Before 2007, Microsoft had, unfortunately, decided to give up on the budget end of the web-design market and FrontPage was abandoned. Its supposed successor, called Expression Web, weighed in at a staggering 1.5GB - and cost a small fortune, thus making Dreamweaver, albeit dearer still, an even more attractive proposition for the pros. Tip - If you are an existing, continuing user of FrontPage, you may occasionally stumble on something the program apparently cannot do. If you don't find a solution in FrontPage's own Help file, look to see if there is confirmation of the limitation, or a workaround, in Microsoft's comprehensive problems' page called the FrontPage Knowledge Base (link still active at 7.2.08). |
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| Web editing with Linux (added 9.2.08) | ||||
| Many computer magazines, from 2007, which, previously, had traditionally
been 100% Windows, noticeably started devoting space to the world of Linux. It was as if the interest by magazines in the Linux alternative was a reaction to
the new Windows Vista. However, no major uptake in Linux can come of it, no matter how hard the magazines might hammer away, because, wherever you go for a new computer, be it Dixons, Comet, Tesco or Aldi, you will always find Vista is thrust upon you every time - there is simply no other choice, not even XP, in those places. Surprisingly, even computer fairs are all XP or Vista - not a sign of anything else. So the Windows' domination, and Vista incursion, is bound to continue regardless. Even the few people who are newly dabbling with Linux are, ironically, doing so on Windows' machines! Using either Linux Live CDs or dual-boot Linux partitions. And, while ever all those people still have that comfort zone of being able to switch back to Windows, you can safely bet that is what virtually all of them will soon find themselves doing. For those who do make the move over to Linux full time, and are also web-page designers, they are in for a hard time because their choice of WYSIWYG web editors is severely limited to only one of any note. An open source tool called KompoZer. |
KompoZer is free but, if you have previously been used to Windows and using FrontPage or Dreamweaver, you will soon find the plaudits end there. KompoZer owes its origins to a web editor called Composer which was first included with version 6 of the since discontinued Netscape Navigator browser. You can see how poorly Composer rated in our blue table above - just 4 out of 10 for beginners - reducing to only 2 out of 10 for people trying to produce proficient web pages. A version of Composer later became available as a small, standalone program called Nvu. However, it never caught on because Nvu had the same limitations that were present in Composer. The subsequent KompoZer is better than Nvu, and certainly a lot better than hand-coding in a text editor which is the other, soul-destroying alternative for Linux users. But, ultimately, it's the same old story for KompoZer as for any other web editor, past or present - for some inexplicable reason, no programmer seems capable of writing one with only good points and no bad points. So the wait for a web editor which is 10/10 perfect in all respects, and sensibly priced at the same time, still remains a vain hope whether you are on Windows or Linux. |
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| First posted 12.9.03 (dmy) Last amended 25.9.08 Copyright (C) 2003-2008 PM Designs All Rights Reserved |
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