Dreamweaver is old hat now, and the GUI hasn't changed for years...its fugly
Coda 2 for a nice easy WYSIWYG editor
Sublime 2 for the best text editor
Thats all you need!
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Web design software for "beginners"
- Thread starter Niko91
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Dreamweaver is old hat now, and the GUI hasn't changed for years...its fugly
Coda 2 for a nice easy WYSIWYG editor
Sublime 2 for the best text editor
Thats all you need!
People saying Dreamweaver produces bloated code haven't used Dreamweaver recently. I wouldn't do the "drag and drop into the wysiwyg view" method because positioning in different browsers is so tricky but as a tool for hand coding it's great, especially when it turns css into the shorthand code for you. The only reason to touch the wysiwyg view is maybe to type text in.
For a beginner, Dreamweaver is nice because you can code in the code view pane and instantly see the result in the lower design view pane. Nicer than coding in a text editor and then going to a browser to view it, back and forth, back and forth. Also really nice for instantly seeing CSS changes. BUT, you need to know that any method isn't going to teach you how to deal with browser differences that will break your design. Eventually, you will need to be able to code without a wysiwyg but for learning what code makes what happen, a wysiwyg is the way to go.
BTW- I started learning html with PAGEMILL so that shows you how long I've been doing it.
For a beginner, Dreamweaver is nice because you can code in the code view pane and instantly see the result in the lower design view pane. Nicer than coding in a text editor and then going to a browser to view it, back and forth, back and forth. Also really nice for instantly seeing CSS changes. BUT, you need to know that any method isn't going to teach you how to deal with browser differences that will break your design. Eventually, you will need to be able to code without a wysiwyg but for learning what code makes what happen, a wysiwyg is the way to go.
BTW- I started learning html with PAGEMILL so that shows you how long I've been doing it.
Adobe Muse is far quicker, easier and prettier than anything else for beginners. It would be absolutely perfect for everyone but the code it creates isn't that great (but you don't need to worry about the code if you're just a beginner looking to make websites with it).
Did it improve in CS6 because it was pretty awful is CS5? Also I might be lucky in that I don't have to code for IE6 at all and as long things are functional in IE7 I can get away with it but I don't have many cross browser problems these days? There are occasional browser prefix issues with CSS3 but that usually gets sorted with the right bit of JavaScript.
Anyway I think the OP right the right choice, going "full notepad" means you miss out syntax highlighting that is vital when you are first starting out, so much time can be wasted just because of a missing bracket, conversely WYSIWYG editors such as dreamweaver produce horrible spaghetti code that just becomes a nightmare when you start to introduce more advanced features with PHP or whatever server language you choose.
Coda offers a nice balance between these two extremes has FTP and SVN support so it's straight forward to manage your files and is not too expensive, I use a combination of that with PHPStorm for larger projects on a daily basis and have done or nearly a year now and I'm pretty happy with it!
Dreamweaver vastly improved its code before CS5, I don't know what you are talking about. Maybe you weren't around when it was really bad. Of course, I don't work in wysiwyg to avoid any automatic positioning code creation so maybe that's the difference. But nothing was ever as bad as FrontPage.
not trying to pick a fight here--I genuinely want to know: from those who say "Dreamweaver writes bad code", can you give any examples? I've used it for years, and it works great.
The only time I've ever managed to make it write inefficient code is when I set it to use the <font> tag (years ago, for marketing emails), and it added a new nested <font> tag each time I edited text.
But it hasn't offered this option in several versions now.
The only time I've ever managed to make it write inefficient code is when I set it to use the <font> tag (years ago, for marketing emails), and it added a new nested <font> tag each time I edited text.
But it hasn't offered this option in several versions now.
I'm not sure using a WYSIWYG editor that produces bad code is a good idea, it just teaches bad code. Fair enough if someone just needs to knock out a really basic page, and they have no intention of actually learning markup. If you want to learn though there's no substitute for getting used to hand coding with something like Sublime, Espresso, Coda, etc. Then later on using Zencode, it's much faster can fiddling about with gimmicky drag and drop.
I'm using Coda2 for development. Photoshop CS6 for storyboarding and design. With the new subscription model for PS, I will probably move the shop towards GIMP for future projects.
Check out Sketch and Pixelmator.
Sketch in particular is amazing and inexpensive, they recently released version 3. I switched to it from Fireworks around two years ago and I am quite happy with it.
Thank you, I will certainly check them out.
Two Hours later:
Wow! Sketch has REALLY come along way since I first saw it. I'm buying it and starting to work with it immediately! Thank you.
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I personally would recommend Brackets, it's open source software by Adobe. I personally find it a little bit nicer then Dreamweaver, and it has a ton of great extensions for it.
Thanks for those links! To be honest whilst I mostly focus on writing good HTML, CSS (and of course server side code) I do still have to work with image manipulation software every so often and to be honest to see some viable alternatives to Photoshop (at least for the kind of work I do) is quite refreshing.