Website Editors

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If you are one that takes care of your own horse related website, or you have a desire to start, here is a list of editors you can use. Some of these editors are complex and costly, and some of them are easy to understand and not that expensive.

Web Editors For Beginners

Windows

Evrsoft First Page

Evrsoft First Page is a nice editor. It offers a lot of the features you expect from a professional Web editing package. It is advertised as completely free, but the free version has significant features (like WYSIWYG) disabled. To get them, you need to pay for the full license. The easiest way to purchase this product is to download Evrsoft First Page and then click on the buy now button.

SeaMonkey

SeaMonkey is the Mozilla project all-in-one Internet application suite. It includes a Web browser, email and newsgroup client, IRC chat client, and composer – the Web page editor. One of the nice things about using SeaMonkey is that you have the browser built-in already so testing is a breeze. Plus it’s a free WYSIWYG editor with an embedded FTP to publish your Web pages.

CoffeeCup Free HTML Editor

The CoffeeCup Free HTML editor is a text editor with a lot of potential. A lot of the features it has in the menus are reliant on other CoffeeCup products to use – such as FTP, the photo gallery maker, CSS editing, and so on. This is still a powerful HTML editor, but I would recommend you purchase the full version of the editor to get the real juice from this product. One important thing to note: many sites list this editor as a free WYSIWYG editor, but when I tested, you had to buy the full version to get WYSIWYG support. The free version is a very nice text editor only.

PageBreeze Professional

PageBreeze Professional offers you all the features of PageBreeze Free HTML editor, but with a few extra features. You can purchase the software directly or get it free when you buy FormBreeze form processing for your Web pages. If you know you’ll have a lot of Web forms to maintain, this editor could be a very good deal.

Dynamic HTML Editor Free

The free version of Dynamic HTML Editor is a few revisions back from the paid version and it’s only free for non-profits and personal use. But if that is you, and you don’t want to learn more than file transfers for getting your Web pages to your host, then this program would work fine. It has some graphics editing and is easy to drag and drop the elements around on the page.

Macintosh

Rapidweaver

RapidWeaver is misleading. At first glance it appears to be a fairly basic WYSIWYG editing tool, but when you push beneath the surface, there is a lot there to surprise you. I created a site with a large photo gallery, a blog, and two stand-alone Web pages in about 15 minutes. These included images and fancy formatting. And it was fun to do. This is a great program for newcomers to Web design, as they can get started quickly and then advance to more complicated pages including PHP and other languages all with the same editor. I don’t like that it doesn’t validate HTML that you hand code and I couldn’t figure out how to add an external link in one of the WYSIWYG pages, but there are probably extensions or add-ons in the user community to do.

Freeway Express

Freeway Express is a great basic Web page editor for the Macintosh. It includes basic graphics editing and creation so that you only need one software package to create simple Web sites. One drawback is that you can only save your files as HTML 4, there is no support for any other DTD.

Create

Create is an extensive graphics manipulation program that also acts as a Web page editor. It provides WYSIWYG functionality to make it easy to place objects and elements. But it’s true strength is in the graphics manipulation features it has. You can create text and image objects and then manipulate them in many ways. It is quite fun to use. With version 14 it now offers CSS layout (rather than tables), but this is not turned on by default. This is a fine editor for kids and people who are new to Web design, but might get frustrating for designers who want more control over the content and less focus on the graphics.

Web Editors For Professionals

Windows

Adobe Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver is one of the most popular professional Web development software packages available. It offers power and flexibility to create pages that meet your needs. I use it for everything from JSP, XHTML, PHP, and XML development. It is a good choice for professional Web designers and developers, but if you’re working as a solitary freelancer, you might want to look at one of the CS suites like Web or Design to get graphics editing capability as well.

Adobe Creative Suite Web Standard

Creative Suite Web Standard is the minimum a freelancing Web designer needs to build and maintain Web sites. It comes with Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, and Contribute. These give you graphics editing, HTML editing, and Flash as well as Contribute to provide your customers with support. It also comes with Bridge to manage your images and Device Central to work with mobile devices. If you don’t anticipate needing a lot of graphics manipulation, this is the perfect suite for a freelancer.? It also offers a lot of features that a member of a Web design team can appreciate like check-in check-out, templates, and integrated version control.

Microsoft Expression Web

Expression Web 2 offers everything professional Web designers have come to expect from a world-class Web editing tool, including HTML validation, WYSIWYG and text editor support, support for CSS, and lots of templates. The biggest benefit to Expression Web over other top-quality Web editors is the price. It is missing just a couple of the features of other high-ranked editors, but it has a lot of built-in support for ASP.Net and ASP.Net Ajax. If you work on ASP.Net pages, this is the perfect editor.

NetOjbects Fusion

Fusion is a very powerful HTML editor. It combines all the tasks you need to get your website up and running including development, design, and FTP. Plus you can add special features to your pages like captchas on forms and ecommerce support.

HTML-Kit Tools

HTML-Kit Tools offers all the features of HTML-Kit with a few extras. It is the next version of HTML-Kit, but the developers have decided to charge a small fee for their superb program. HTML-Kit Tools add features like snippets, project management, validating all your files at once, even creating videos.

Macintosh

Komodo Edit

Komodo Edit is hands down the best free XML editor available. It also includes a lot of great features for HTML and CSS development. Plus, if that isn’t enough, you can get extensions for it to add on languages or other helpful features (like special characters). It’s not the best HTML editor, but it’s great for what you pay, especially if you build in XML.

KompoZer

KompoZer is a good WYSIWYG editor. It is based on the popular Nvu editor – only it is called an “unofficial bug-fix release.” KompoZer was conceived by some people who really liked Nvu, but were fed up with the slow release schedules and poor support. So they took it over and released a less buggy version of the software. Ironically, there hasn’t been a new release of KompoZer in over a year.

Nvu

Nvu is a good WYSIWYG editor. I prefer text editors to WYSIWYG editors, but if you don’t, then Nvu is a great choice, especially considering that it’s free. I love that it has a site manager to allow you to review the sites that you’re building. It’s surprising that this software is free. Feature highlights: XML support, advanced CSS support, full site management, built-in validator, and international support as well as WYSIWYG and color coded XHTML editing.

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