How do you like to build your Web site?

[Susan Strom]

I was just curious about everybody's preferred method of Web site building.

I just code mine in HTML. Some years ago I took some classes in HTML writing at the graphics college where I work. There’s something kind of cool about HTML, about the simplicity of writing in it. Not sure why, but I kind of enjoy it. I’m a graphic designer by trade so maybe it’s the love of simple things.

When I was giving the site a facelift a couple years ago, I tried a site-building program. The code it wrote was complete spaghetti, a useless mess, and it caused the pages to have alignment problems as well. I never published them; I went back to hand coding vanilla HTML and never used a site-builder again.

I just did another major update for 2006. I spent the three-day MLK weekend working at my computer with almost no breaks, it was hard work but I enjoyed it. The HTML, caption writing, image sizing, uploading and file mgmt was extremely tedious and time consuming but that's ok.

Sometimes I’ll add new elements one brick at a time, and sometimes I’ll sit and work on the site for extended periods.

So for me, I just write and edit my entire site in HTML. I don't care for blinking things and a lot of the "extras", but that's just preference.

What do you guys do, Dreamweaver, Flash, PHP etc.? How do you guys like to build and maintain your sites?

 

[Dan Robinson]

I started out coding in HTML in 1995. It is easy to learn, and once you get the hang of it, you can usually build a site faster this way than most people can with a WYSIWYG editor like FrontPage or DreamWeaver.

The problem with the WYSIWYGs is that it's hard to have precise control over details - like pixel-by-pixel sizing of table cells, fonts and alignments - important for complex designs. And yes the WYSIWYGs are very inefficient with code - sometimes I've had to take over maintenance of a site built with a WYSIWYG. The code was so jumbled, disorganized and excessive that I had to just re-code the entire thing by hand to clean it up.

The WYSIWYGs have a place, but if you can learn the code you'll be much better off. Most the time building a web site is in the graphics stage. Once I finish that, the HTML is a snap.

 

[Tony Laubach]

I'm a huge user of Dreamweaver. I, too, began by writing HTML code on Notepad, but when time didn't permit me to do that as much, I gave in to the editors and fell in love with Dreamweaver. I am still able to code it on my own if I choose, but the templates, WYSIWYG editing, and its own FTP client makes it such a nice program for website developers.

 

[Jeff Snyder]

I've tried using site-building applications like Dreamweaver, but I've always come back to hard-coding using a standard text editor like Notepad. IMO, it's just as easy to code the HTML as it is to use a program like Dreamweaver. I'm sure there are a myriad of advantages to DW, but for me, at least, and what I do, it's easier to hard-code. I've always found that site-building programs tend to make pages that have excess, bloated code.

My first site used tables like crazy. I modified a few things to use server-side includes, but that wasn't a big change. A couple of years ago, I changed the site to utilize CSS stylesheets instead, and it's stayed that way until just a couple of weeks ago. I'm currently in the process of moving much of my site (as of now, just the storm chasing portion) to PHP. Since all of my chase logs have the same general format, using PHP along with MySQL makes the site much easier to organize. For example, if I want to change the look of all of my chase logs, I only need to change a single page, instead of having to edit the 50-odd individual chase log pages that I have now. I've found PHP to be incredibly useful, and relatively easy to learn if you spend some time at www.php.net and look through the tutorials (http://www.php.net/manual/en/index.php ).

 

[Tyler Allison]

vi with php

 

[B Ozanne]

I'm using Namo Webeditor. It was relatively cheap and works great. I played around with Dreamweaver and Frontpage and they were always crashing. The code that Namo creates is really clean too, well, compared to other editors. When you erase something the code actually goes away.

Here are my two websites:

http://www.shorelineweather.com/

http://www.easternlight.net/

Both were made with Namo

 

[Edward Ballou]

vi with php

Am I the only one who found this humorous? Ahhh, the good old vi editor.

Back to topic, I've used dreamweaver in the past and liked it. I had a few problems with getting a template to all my pages. I often found myself digging into the HTML to correct the inaccuracies of the WYSIWYG.

Now I'm experimenting with Wordpress and php. Just started my new site although I'm not ready for total public release yet. It hasn't been too much of a problem although there are some resizing issues I have yet to figure out.

 

[Sheila_Ward]

vi with php

Am I the only one who found this humorous? Ahhh, the good old vi editor.

Back to topic, I've used dreamweaver in the past and liked it. I had a few problems with getting a template to all my pages. I often found myself digging into the HTML to correct the inaccuracies of the WYSIWYG.

Now I'm experimenting with Wordpress and php. Just started my new site although I'm not ready for total public release yet. It hasn't been too much of a problem although there are some resizing issues I have yet to figure out.

LOL. The editor I love to hate, vi! It reminds me of editing in TSO (for any of you mainframe folks out there).

I use Dreamweaver. I like it for the site management functions more than using for the actual creation of the pages. I use the template function, which saves me a lot of time when making changes that need to be duplicated to all pages. But I spend most of my time in the "code" view. Dreamweaver doesn't seem to add as much junk code as other wysiwyg editors, but it's not perfect.

 

[Joey Ketcham]

When I first learned how to make websites, I coded everything in HTML using wordpad or notepad. I did it this way for the longest time and then I started using Frontpage.

I love frontpage, though I still do a lot of tweaking in plain ol' HTML code.

 

[Dan Robinson]

I built the first version of my web site in Pico on the unix server at the WV Tech engineering lab in '95. Using IBM 286 workstations! Pico for the web pages and Pine for email! Everything backed up on a 3.5" disk vthat I took home with me. Those were the days. VI was there but was just too backwards, what a strange editor that was. I had four scanned lightning photos of mine on my site back then, with color depths of something less than 256 - the scanner was primitive and they looked awful, but I was excited to have something actually online!

I actually used Pico and server-based editing for almost 3 years (1995 to 1998). It was a big adjustment to start using client-based editing with notepad/wordpad and WS-FTP when I graduated and lost my college server account.

Wordpad is easier to use than notepad, NP seems to have some quirky line wrapping issues in later versions of Windows. To this day I still use Wordpad. I don't change my web site MO unless I am absolutely forced to.

Hard to believe that was almost 11 years ago. Man things have changed!

 

[Andrew Khan]

I use a combination of things. Sometimes I will use VB to create online web programs, and interfaces. I usually, however create my layout/design in Adobe Photoshop CS2, and slice it there, then get the coding and code it with notepad and Macromedia Dreamweaver MX. I then upload all my files with either WS-FTP Pro or FTPRUSH.

 

[Robert Dewey]

Contracting it out to someone who knows what the heck they are doing :lol:

I have a company website coming up, and then another project that will take several programmers a few months to write (it uses just about every prog. langauge out there, LOL).

 

[Scott Bell]

ahhh, the joys of vi....brings back great memories!

for those folks that are using word pad or note pad, you might try a program called text pad that has several handy features for working with java and html including a preview option, automatic indentation and code highlighting . I always show this to my students and they really like it. You can also open multiple documents at once and they are listed in a side panel which makes editing linked pages much easier.

 

[Andy Wehrle]

I use Microsoft Publisher, which has its own built-in WYSIWG editor. In fact, the idea of creating my own web site first came to me when I noticed the "create web page" option under the "New Publication" menu. You can set up your web page, then go to "Preview" and it will generate the HTML which pops up in Internet Explorer, and can then be saved as a .htm or .html document that can be uploaded to the Internet.

In the process of dabbling around with this for awhile, I learned some of the basic points of HTML editing so I can modify web pages without having to go back to Publisher and re-upload every time I want to make changes. My site still looks fairly amateurish, but I'm getting the hang of the finer things like animation and backgrounds that are making it look better.

 

[Mike Gauldin]

I use FrontPage for HTML editing (I like the coloring of the code). I rarely use it's actual 'Editing' feature, just the 'HTML' code and 'Preview'. I edit my pages by hand in HTML using CSS (now that I'm getting the hang of setting up complex designs... if you can call them that). I use Photoshop 9 for graphics. I'm getting ready to break in to php when I get the time because it has a lot of features I'd really like to use. I usually redo my site a few times a year and make it better. I just redid it this past few months and the few parts I'm working on now are much better code-wise than the first part of it, so I'll end up redoing it later as always. Then I test my site in FireFox and IE to make sure everything looks okay. I would recommend anyone who builds I site (especially if your using CSS) to check it in at least IE and FireFox (as Netscape can render both browsers) to make sure everything looks correct since they both handle code differently. Even things such as 'alt' and 'title' HTML code is handled differently. God forbid you try CSS 'display: inline-block', heh.