Advice on web development software

What is the nature of the website(s) you are in charge of?

Are they for the world to see or are they primarily for your company's use?

 

For building web site, I always loved Macromedia Dreamweaver. It lets you get at the code but has a great graphical view for laying pages out etc. I've not used the latest version (MX) only the Ultra Dev one, that writes serverside code for you...I belive MX intergrates ultra devs server side functionality also. I find it much easer to use tha other web site creation programs, although I havn't used Adobes verion, which is Dreamweavers main rival I guess. Dreamweaver has basic flash functionality built in, but if your gonna do a lot then its worth getting the full version or macromedia studio...theres also a flash compatible program by adobe too....or theres always notepad

 

another vote for MX here. do a search on "dreamweaver" or "web design program" or something similar on these forums and you'll find a lot of threads discussing their relative merits.

i also learned HTML from the ground up, and it's important to have a good handle on the p's and q's of code before letting a program write it for you. that said, MX does a pretty good job of writing code when you ask it to -- and an even better job of staying out of your way when you want to roll up your sleeves and do it yourself.

i'll just mention two features that i rely on heavily and that make MX my suite of choice:

1) extensive references. without leaving dreamweaver, i can get thorough usage help and reference on HTML, CSS, ColdFusion, JavaScript, ASP and JSP, and accessibility/useability. comes straight from the good people at O'Reilly.

2) extensibility. when i find myself coding similar functions or modifying similar objects over and over, i can write a simple JavaScript extension and automate the process. i can have it write code based on certain inputs, or modify code based on what's already there -- for instance, i just wrote one that takes whatever text i've selected and wraps it in an <a> tag.
it'll grab the selected text, and if it doesn't find my domain anywhere within that text, it knows it must be an external link and it'll add target="blank" to the tag. i can also have it add "http://" if that's not already present, or i can have it bring up a little window asking if it's a URL or a file and add "http://" or "ftp://" accordingly, or whatever i want... easy, pleasy, nice and cheesy.