Web Design & Development: Authoring Tool Basics

Web pages have come a long way since surfers starting browsing them in the early 90's. Underlying technologies have come, gone, and changed. The earliest pages lacked any real form of dynamic media, information, or interaction. To adapt to an ever changing Internet, there have been many web page and site creation tools that have gone to the wayside, or that have been re-engineered and re-tooled. If you consider the disciplines of web authoring, design and development, there are many tools that cater to one, the other, or both.

Early developers used basic software applications even as simple as Windows Notepad for web site development. This approach forgoes the nice drag-and-drop visual interface, and focuses purely on line-by-line coding. Many of today's developers till prefer to work in such an environment, much like many traditional computer programmers take a strictly coded approach, rather than use a bloated visual application. There are a few great solutions available for web coding that offer more than found in an ordinary text editor. Notepad++ for example, a free open source application, is a favorite among many who code in Java, PHP, HTML, CSS, XML and more. Notepad++ contains many basic features that appeal to web developers, such as, line numbering, syntax highlighting, and W3C validation for HTML and CSS. A similar and affordable commercial application, UltraEdit, by IDM Computer Solutions Inc., provides features including line change notification, XML Management, and function lists.

For the web designer, there is no doubt that the most common and likely popular application suite would be the Adobe CS collection. With applications available separately, or in a variety of collections, Adobe's Dreamweaver, Flash and Photoshop for example, take web design and integrate features throughout the applications with a common interface. Dreamweaver, which was once a Macromedia product that contains hints of acquired Allaire's Homesite, and is a replacement for Adobe's own Go Live, is certainly Adobe's mainstream web design flagship. Dreamweaver has gone through many changes, but constant strengths have always been visual web design coupled with coded development. With a split-screen view, design and development can go hand-in-hand with a view of code in one window, and a visual view in another, giving a web site creator the best of both worlds. Integration with the mentioned applications and others allow images and media to be brought directly into Dreamweaver for inclusion on a page. Another strong feature of Dreamweaver, and other Adobe applications are extensions. Free and commercial extensions, such as ready to build PayPal shopping features, are available to extend the development experience.

Microsoft has been hard at work luring in web authors with its own web creation suite known as Expression Studio 4. The collection which is in its fourth generation, isn't quite as collectively full featured as Adobe's suite, yet its web Expression application (a professional replacement for FrontPage) delivers similar functionality found in Dreamweaver. A positive note for developers, Web Expression supports extended development for server side technologies, such as, PHP, Silverlight, and Ajax. In earlier versions, the Microsoft product historically was an ASP.NET friendly application only.

For the budget conscious web designer and developer, there are some honorable mentions. These applications don't include all of the bells and whistles of the professional packages; however, they are feature rich, and won't break the bank. CoffeeCup Software's HTML Editor and Visual Site Designer are two separate products that collectively include features such as HTML validation, easy Flash integration, CSS Designer, Code Snippets, and more. Both of the software applications are available for trial download, and are perfect for the beginning to intermediate web author.

Resources:

Adobe Dreamweaver CS5
Microsoft Web Expression 4
CoffeeCup Software HTML Editor
CofeeCup Software Visual Site Designer
Notepad++
IDM Computer Solutions Inc. Ultra Edit