Unless you have completely farmed out the creation of your site, or you employ a webmaster to do the work, you must have some software to create your website. Dreamweaver is probably the most popular software to create web pages with. It is very nice, color codes the different aspects of a web page so your code stands out from your copy. It has lots of nice features and really helps to make the coding chores easier. In many ways it is good software.

But be careful. With this product you can easily upload old pages up over the new pages and effectively destroy your site. There is quite a bit of automation built into the software, to supposedly make it better. I don't really like all this automation myself. It's a personal thing. I like to have complete control over what is happening, and I don't like to rely on a piece of software to do, or not do, any particular thing opposed to any other particular thing. Give me complete control. Dreamweaver does allow all these features to be turned on and off.

Many people use FrontPage that comes as part of Microsoft Office. I'm sure it helps those who don't have a clue how to create a website to get their site online. As to the finished product. It leaves a lot to be desired and quite often makes SEO an impossible task to take on. I could go into detail about why it does things the way it does, but to save time I'll just point out that it is a Microsoft product. It makes the very simple, very complex. I have seen complete nightmares created with FrontPage. I had a client whose webhost had setup some special interface for FrontPage and wouldn't let us edit the site. I guess the webmistress was afraid we'd figure out what was really going on. The poor client paid us quite a sum only to have all our work overwritten by his webmistress shortly after he finished working with us. We did good for him too, he had a couple dozen good keywords in the top 10.

If you have FrontPage I suggest you uninstall it. Delete it. Burn the CD. Have a little ceremony if you must, but be sure to get rid of it. Once, and for all time.

As I've mentioned in another part of this course, I use a product called NoteTab Pro, which is a pure ASCII editor/word processor, with all kinds of added features. It makes my job easier, I'm used to it, and I wouldn't wake up in the morning without it!

Everyone else in my office uses DreamWeaver. It's a good product. It works well. It doesn't take over websites and it allows you complete control over your HTML. I use it occasionally. The only reason I don't use it more often is that I have come to love NoteTab Pro over the years and I know it well. It is programmable and I have learned many, many ins and outs with it. Great program. DreamWeaver is also a great program and my colleagues swear by it. So, it's up to you, but please, don't get caught up in the Windoze arena and use that confounded FrontPage.

Be careful picking out a product to create a website. Another client of mine, well he was briefly a client of mine, bought some software that created an image out of whatever you typed into it. The end result was a website that was one big image. Nothing on this site was able to be seen by a search engine. Not one letter was ever indexed by this site. As far as I know the owner is still using that product and generating traffic exclusively through Pay Per Click (PPC). I wish him good luck in his endeavor to spend, spend, spend.

So what you want it a simple editor you can write HTML with. Learn HTML. Learn to write it yourself. Don't let software run your site for you, learn what code is needed and what isn't needed. HTML is not a programming language and really is fairly easy to figure out. The basics are a piece of cake. Believe me, it's easier to learn a little than to have your site crippled by some interface that generates mega code sites.

Another example I can point out is an Interface called something easy, or easy something. As far from the truth as you can get. My client generated his site with this program. I had few choices in optimizing the site as there was absolutely no way I could touch the pages he made. Eventually I had to simply recreate the site in plain HTML eliminating all the crap. His file sizes were in the 50K and up realm. Mine were around 8 to 12K.

Not much else to say really, about the editors. There are quite a few around, most provide some sort of help in writing where they aid you with code and sometimes (like NoteTab does) with CSS and more.

I should probably tell you, since I am pushing for the simpler programs, NoteTab does not come "out of the box" working like I tout it does. It takes some setting up to get there. The NoteTab site lists a lot of what they call "clips". These clips are what is programmed about the software, like small plug-ins. They allow you to code easier, and are particularly useful with CSS.

NotePad that comes with Windoze is a fine HTML editor.


Unless you have completely farmed out the creation of your site, or you employ a webmaster to do the work, you must have some software to create your website. Dreamweaver is probably the most popular software to create web pages with. It is very nice, color codes the different aspects of a web page so your code stands out from your copy. It has lots of nice features and really helps to make the coding chores easier. It is good software.

But be careful. With this product you can easily upload old pages up over the new pages and effectively destroy your site. There is quite a bit of automation built into the software, to supposedly make it better. I don't really like all this automation myself. It's a personal thing. I like to have complete control over what is happening, and I don't like to rely on a piece of software to do, or not do, any particular thing opposed to any other particular thing. Give me complete control. Dreamweaver does allow all these features to be turned on and off.

Many people use FrontPage that comes as part of Microsoft Office. I'm sure it helps those who don't have a clue how to create a website to get their site online. As to the finished product. It leaves a lot to be desired and quite often makes SEO an impossible task to take on. I could go into detail about why it does things the way it does, but to save time I'll just point out that it is a Microsoft product. It makes the very simple, very complex. I am working on a client's site right now that was originally created in FrontPage. Although the webmaster for this company has tried to remove all the FrontPage residue and change it, FrontPage has embedded itself into the site so badly that the site breaks down when he gets into the shopping cart and database. The worst thing about this site is we can't change the title tags for each page. They are the same on every single page of the site. This site will never rank well as long as FrontPage is controlling the HTML.

If you have FrontPage I suggest you uninstall it. Delete it. Burn the CD. Have a little ceremony if you must, but be sure to get rid of it. Once, and for all time.

As I've mentioned in another part of this course, I use a product called NoteTab Pro, which is a pure ASCII editor/word processor, with all kinds of added features. It makes my job easier, I'm used to it, and I wouldn't wake up in the morning without it!

Everyone else in my office uses DreamWeaver. It's a good product. It works well. It doesn't take over websites and it allows you complete control over your HTML. I use it occasionally. The only reason I don't use it more often is that I have come to love NoteTab Pro over the years and I know it well. It is programmable and I have learned many, many ins and outs with it. Great program. DreamWeaver is also a great program and my colleagues swear by it. So, it's up to you, but please, don't get caught up in the Windoze arena and use that confounded FrontPage.

Be careful picking out a product to create a website. Another client of mine, well he was briefly a client of mine, bought some software that created an image out of whatever you typed into it. The end result was a website that was one big image. Nothing on this site was able to be seen by a search engine. Not one letter was ever indexed by this site. As far as I know the owner is still using that product and generating traffic exclusively through Pay Per Click (PPC). I wish him good luck in his endeavor to spend, spend, spend.