PageBreeze: Beginners Web Development Freeware

Here is my experience with free and legal web page software. I must have tried more than 20 HTML editors before I ended up with PageBreeze. It was the obvious winner. I run the web site for a fishing club and am not a trained software critic.

There are 2 main ways of editing the HTML code of a web page. First there is a TEXT editor which could even be a simple word processor. This type of editor will let you edit your code in detail. If you wanted a photo to be 399 pixels by 400 pixels, then you have the power to type that into the code even if the photo is really 400 pixels by 400 pixels. This ability is necessary for changing things to exactly what you want without limitations.

Then you have the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors. Here you can toss your photos around on the web page as you design it and the editor will type in the size of the photos and their location perfectly and automatically. It will place colors all around to the shade you pick from a rainbow and type that in for you behind the scenes in a split second. With a text editor, you have to look up all those numbers and it is a lot of extremely tedious and boring labor.

What you and I want is a combination text editor and WYSIWYG editor in one program. Even the payware market only has a few of these and they are expensive, around $200 and up. All of my work on the web is volunteer so I try to keep the negative cash flow low. I used to have such a program years ago, but that one is not available for newer operating systems the last time I checked. I think it was from Germany and called "WebWerX" possibly. That one was perfect.

The editors in the freeware category often don't have full descriptions. They may promise to be "easy to use" and the only thing you can do is spend the time trying them yourself to find out. Many were eliminated just because they were not even freeware, but trialware. That means they stop functioning after a period of time such as 30 days unless you buy them. Practically all the others were either WYSIWYG or text only editors. PageBreeze was the only obvious choice, being truly free, and it can edit text or WYSIWYG as you wish.

PageBreeze is a pretty good HTML editor. In fact it's perfect except for one bug I found. When I started using it 4 years ago it would freeze almost daily in the text mode and all the code would disappear if I scrolled a little fast or sometimes for no reason. Everything I had in code on that page was lost suddenly. Fortunately, the code was saved from the last time I saved so you can reopen the page to the last saved page. All the work I did since the last save was lost, so I just saved frequently. I got a newer update last year and that defect was gone until 10 months later when it did that once so I upgraded again to version 4.0b. The same bug then popped up a month later, but it hasn't happened for 4 months now. By the way it is January, 2008 that I am writing this.

If you are just starting out, you can use PageBreeze for your editor and maybe go online to some HTML tutorial sites and begin right now. The free tutorials are wonderful. The only other software that I use for web page development is an FTP program and a graphics editor. I use freeware for those too. I always try tucows.com first, but I have tried about 20 other freeware sites and have never had any trouble with viruses, etc.. The reason I use Tucows first is just that I can remember the name. When they don't have the software I want, I just Google "freeware graphics editor" or something similar and go to one of those results.

HyperTextMarkUp language is not as difficult as you imagine. Every web page's code is visible in your browser if you choose the "view" menu and choose "page source" or the equivalent if you aren't using Mozilla Firefox for your web browser. These code examples can help you learn very fast.