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Designing Great Sites
In My Opinion
Staff Writer
If you're a glutton for laborious, detail-oriented work, you can go ahead and type out every single tag and piece of text on your page. All it
takes is a missing "/" to ruin your whole page though, so a visual HTML Web page building-authoring tool can save you a tremendous amount of time and aggravation.
After you conquer the basics of HyperText Markup Language, or HTML, you may discover that your next battle is design. What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) editors work more like desktop publishing
programs, allowing you to drag elements onto the page allowing you to see exactly what your page will look like when rendered in the browser. While you work on a "what you see is what you get" basis, the program does
the heavy lifting in the background, cobbling together code to pull off the look you want.
Whether you need an interactive Web site or a basic home page, today's visual Web authoring products make it easier than ever to build an attractive site without knowing a lick of HTML. With these tools, you can build
increasingly sophisticated sites, even while knowing less and less HTML.
After trying multiple products (FrontPage 2000, Dreamweaver, and GoLive), I found NetObjects Fusion to be very user friendly in the development of my site. It’s like a dream come true. It allows you to create a fairly
sophisticated site quickly and easily. With just a little Web savvy you can start producing sites right away.
Keep A Grip On Your Site
Although WYSIWYG tools are appealing in their simplicity, allowing the computer to make decisions about your code can result in convoluted documents that are difficult to repurpose later on if, for example, you redesign your
site but want to retain the content. WYSIWYG editors are great tools for beginners, but advanced Web page designers find these programs constraining.
Advanced users shouldn't be dumping current coding tools any time soon.
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