web design software prices

web design software prices

in unit 6 of this course, you’ll be exploring the advantages and disadvantages of wysiwyg web editing applications. wysiwyg stands for “what you see is what you get.” if the thought of coding an endless sea of tags and attributes makes you break into a cold sweat, then this, my friends, is the unit for you. wysiwyg programs allow non-coders to put together a web page much in the same manner one would assemble a microsoft word document. just pop in your text, make formatting changes, and all the code gets written for you on the back end.

i’ll be making use of microsoft frontpage in this video, but there are other packages out there, such as adobe dreamweaver or xsitepro. you’ll need to consult the documentation of your particular application to learn about its various formatting and site management offerings. while the various editors sport vaguely different layouts, all of them offer a set of distinct views. you’ve got your standard view (the “what you see” part), but with a click of a button, you can also view the underlying code.

in fact, most applications now offer a ‘split view’ feature that enables you to view both at the same time. with wysiwyg editors, ease of use is the name of the game. if you can use a word processor, you can use one of these tools. notice how distinctly word-like the frontpage toolbars are (of course, the fact they’re both part of the microsoft office suite probably helps). but see how easily i can change styles, add an image, etc. – everything that used to require writing lines of code. and speaking of styles, most of these authoring tools

offer advanced ways of dealing with css as well. check out the style dialog of my site. i can edit the style of my

tag in a much more intuitive way, and my css style code updates itself automatically. now, while wysiwg editors can certainly make things easier, they’re by no means perfect. sometimes the code they create is sloppy and needs a bit of cleaning up. sometimes css isn’t supported at all, and the application has its own wonky formatting support

that doesn’t adhere to w3c conventions. the techniques you learned earlier in the course will serve you well in the quest for clean code. of course, one really cool thing about authoring software is its ability to help automate jobs like checking for broken links, ferreting out accessibility and browser compatibility problems, and even publishing your entire site to a web server. these can save you hours of time by breezing through management tasks that you would otherwise have had to do manually.

web design software prices