Once you’ve decided on the general layout of your website using good old fashioned paper and pencil, you’ll need the tools to help make your design a reality. Many designers will tell you that the only way ahead is to use a text editor, whilst others will tell you that a WYSIWYG HTML editor is the only way to go. Here at CWS we use a combination of both, but at the end of the day it’s your decision. Designing completely in a text editor is time consuming and will mean that you will have to learn quite a lot of HTML code. Using a WYSIWYG editor to generate the HTML code for you will save you lots of time, but you may still need to edit some of the generated code to deal with the inevitable errors that creeps in. Even commercial products such as Dreamweaver need slight tweaks to the generated code to make it validate properly.
Microsoft FrontPage is another common commercial WYSIWYG HTML editor. While FrontPage is reasonably easy to use, in our experience the generated code is difficult to make comply with the HTML and accessibility standards. It also generates bloated code which will mean your pages will take longer to download than they ought to. For these simple reasons CWS advise you to steer well clear of FrontPage.
It’s also possible to use Microsoft Word to generate your HTML code, but due to the fact that Word wasn’t designed specifically to do this, the resulting web pages have the potential to look very amateurish. Word also suffers from similar bloating and validation problems to FrontPage. Again our advice is to steer well clear.
Whatever route you take, there are many free tools to help you.
WYSIWYG HTML editors
Text editors