Which is the Best Site Builder Available?

February 7th, 2008, 2:45 am

Can anybody tell me which is the best site builder available on the market, that offers a wide range of tools. Must not be to expensive though.
I'm quite new at this, have made this site Hartlepool Visitor Guide please tell me what you think and how I can improve this site.

[righteous_trespasser]

February 7th, 2008, 3:19 am

betman2win wrote:

Can anybody tell me which is the best site builder available on the market, that offers a wide range of tools. Must not be to expensive though.

Notepad ...

betman2win wrote:

I'm quite new at this, have made this site Hartlepool Visitor Guide please tell me what you think and how I can improve this site.

This should be posted in the "website reviews" forum of ozzu ...

February 8th, 2008, 9:20 am

The best inexpensive site builder? Me! LOL. Leave those things alone! Either bite the bullet and pay someone or do what I did, learn how to create your own code. Site builders suck IMO. All the sites pretty much look and function the same, some of them break up in depending on the browser and worst of all they take money out of the hands of millions of designers and developers that have to pay back student loans. Support the economy! Feed a designer's kid! Hire a professional (or semi-professional) today!

[graphixboy]

February 8th, 2008, 11:16 am

Quote:

Support the economy! Feed a designer's kid! Hire a professional (or semi-professional) today!

Man I couldn't have said it better myself. Can I put that on my site? I think it should be a big web 2.0y button that links directly to paypal Now if I could just find time to finish my site...

February 8th, 2008, 11:31 am

graphixboy wrote:

Quote:

Support the economy! Feed a designer's kid! Hire a professional (or semi-professional) today!

Man I couldn't have said it better myself. Can I put that on my site? I think it should be a big web 2.0y button that links directly to paypal Now if I could just find time to finish my site...

LOL. You can use that. I actually got inspired by my barber. I accidentally shaved half my mustache (which I've had for the last 20 years) off. I went in and asked him to fix it. He told me the worse thing they could have ever done was start selling professional barber supplies to the general public!

You're still napping?

[spork]

February 9th, 2008, 2:34 am

Well, now that this thread has been thoroughly hijacked, I'll throw in my two cents in an attempt to answer the actual question.

Like R_T hinted, Notepad (or any other basic text editor, take your pick) is the best too available. Site builders often throw a lot of cutter into your code and prevent the person creating the website from actually understanding how that site is set up.

Learn the basics of HTML and CSS, and I guarantee you won't need a site builder.

February 9th, 2008, 2:37 pm

In text editors, I prefer something with syntax highlighting and smart indentation. Notepad makes you do more work than is necessary, pressing space 4n times every time I want a new line? No thanks.

[spork]

February 9th, 2008, 4:18 pm

I agree. The three things I want are syntax highlighting, smart indentation, and line numbers. Anything more is just frills.

February 9th, 2008, 4:23 pm

Oh yeah, forgot about line numbers.

Tell you what else I like: brace and bracket matching, whereby if your cursor is next to either, the corresponding character is marked in some way.

Lately I've been a big fan of Geany: http://geany.uvena.de/

In addition to the things mentioned above, it also scans the file and presents a hierarchical list of classes, methods and variables as an optional sidebar - very useful for quickly seeing the structure of unfamiliar files.

February 9th, 2008, 7:25 pm

Dreamweaver would be the best. Because it makes things much easier to do. Such as it tries to figure out what CSS attribute you are trying to use.

February 9th, 2008, 8:10 pm

Personally, I do most of my work in Dreamweaver - it's got more features then I'll probably ever need, but I like it's code view a lot, and it's design view isn't half bad either. However, for quick fixes, smaller projects, or those times when I'm just in the mood to get my hands dirty, I like to use just plain old Notepad. I keep a copy of ViM around as well, and more recently a copy of Notepad2, as I like the highlighting. I like a lot of things about ViM more than Notepad2, but Notepad2 is far eaiser to use.

[SpooF]

February 9th, 2008, 9:54 pm

I've been through my fair share of editors, I started out with Geocities online editor, pretty much the worst thing in the world, but that the time I dont think I even knew what HTML was none the less how a browser rendered a webpage.

After that I moved to a basic HTML editor I found on the web, Matrix Y2K. It was rather nice with its html preview and simple struchure, Im not sure how much it has evalved since I last used it, a good four years or more ago.

Soon after I got Dreamweaver. It was great, but I was inspired to be a "hardcoder", and I also got more into php, now Dreamweaver was great for HTML but when I started working with php it didnt help at all. I then found PHP Designer 2005 (http://www.mpsoftware.dk/), when I first started it was free, all the way up to 2006, however after then it had a single payment of around $50. Its an amazing editor for the price and I would recomment it to anyone, however, since its designed and coded by a single person it does have some bugs, but nothing of any real importance. He always offers a free version, usaly the first build of the last release.

[graphixboy]

February 10th, 2008, 1:21 pm

Anyone know of a good WinXP/Vista text editor (lighter weight than dreamweaver) that will let you open/edit files directly over an ftp connection? It would be nice if it had xhmtl/css syntax highlighting and not just xhtml but thats not a deal breaker.

Macromedia's Homesite used to have all the features I needed/want but it hasn't been updated in about 5 years...

I'm really looking for something with similar features to TextWrangler or Coda for my windows machine.

February 11th, 2008, 3:09 pm

EmEditor is nice aswell for highlighting and a notepad like feel. But I prefer Dreamweaver .... as quick fixes in design / split mode or code view to code by hand for those lovely frontpage designed pages that use the TERRIBLE "center" tag .... and I have the joy of editing.

February 11th, 2008, 3:17 pm

Looking at this thread, it's important to distinguish between developers and designers. Quite a few people are both, but I haven't designed anything useful in my life... obviously I'm going to place less emphasis on preview/wysiwyg features.

Talk about hijacking a thread btw...