redoing my old, nasty website

**Soquili** · 11 December 2005, 11:41 PM

Hey John, I found a program that I like even more than notepad. It's called notepad2 http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html

Creates plain vanilla text just like notepad, but it has syntax highlighting for many hypertext, scripting, and programming languages. The source code is also available if you want to add something.

**sallybode** · 11 December 2005, 11:42 PM

Code isn't that hard to learn, you've learned all this stuff, it is just a matter of tags and the structure. Best book I've found is "Sam's Teach yourself HTML in 24 Hours", the text book for the class I took and it really was self-teaching. The teacher had some good lectures, but if you went through a book like that, it isn't long, about 100 pages, the HTML part, you'd have enough of a grip on to edit what you need yourself. The rest, I'd get from Dynamic Drive, lots of fun scripts and you can copy and paste and fiddle with the free scripts, a learning experience for sure.

**John Rayner** · 11 December 2005, 11:49 PM

Hi Bill,

I will have to check that out. I also have ultra edit, but still use wordpad most of the time. No bells and whistles to get in the way.

For years, netscape used to have a very good online manual for both HTML and JS. PERL has docs built in... No teachers, no books, no dirty looks, just hack and slash away.

When you build web pages for engineers/house designers, you need ultimate control over object placement, no program give you that control without ultimate code bloat. Designing a site a present, that will have about 500K pages... All dynamic of course, I do not want to build 500K pages, no matter what the paycheck is.

**williamdruid** · 11 December 2005, 11:56 PM

What I'm going to do is update my site and then practice on it. Eventually I am going to learn Flash. I really like simple sites that look good, a little bit of movement here and there, (Flash, Gif?) but nothing overwhelming. I know I need to learn HTML, CSS, etc. I'm not sure I could visualize it just using coding, I like to see color and shapes as I set it up. The problem is, I get overwhelmed using the programs to lay it out. Sorry, I'm really mixed up right now. Willy

**williamdruid** · 12 December 2005, 12:01 AM

So you are saying I can do a whole website without using anything but Xara and a program I found called NoteTab which is an HTML/text editor? Can you see what your actually building or do you have to just use a mental picture?

**John Rayner** · 12 December 2005, 12:06 AM

Hey Willy,

All those programs do is slap code in for you where you want something. Adjusting things after placement can really get the code bloat going into overtime. A simple text editor will give you the chance just to put in the least amount of code possible to do the job. It just takes much more thought and engineering to get a page to look great with a text editor.

Do a view source from any broswer and you will see exactly how the code is put together. Some load fast, others load slow, and still others, seem to scream they load so fast. These screaming pages are built with a text editor. Lots to learn tho... For instance, the attached page was designed to work with a free shopping cart program... http://www.lakotalaw.com/

**jon spain** · 12 December 2005, 06:58 AM

Willy

Hi, some of us (including Gary) use NetObjectsFusion, which has just been updated to "9", don't know how stable the new version is - yet. The website is www.netobjects.com and it does what I want with little real trouble (others will certainly disagree).

**rpc9943** · 12 December 2005, 06:39 PM

Well I dont know about you guys but Ive always coded with 1stpage, i love it. its simple.

anyways

RonC

**AndFarr** · 12 December 2005, 08:30 PM

I've used Netobjects fusion since version 5, but find that It seems to get increasingly unstable over time ( from install ). I went to the NetObjects fusion forum to see what the users were saying about the new version and read that many were experiencing problems, So this time I think I'll be switching to Adobe GoliveCS. A huge decision since it means that I'll essentially be rebuilding my website from scratch! Oh well~! -AF

**MerryOtter** · 13 December 2005, 05:10 AM

williamdruid,

If you find GoLive, Dreamweaver, and FrontPage to be overkill for what you're trying to accomplish, you might look into nVu:

http://www.nvu.com/

This is a free, open-source web page editor that does WYSIWYG editing (you can "see" what you're doing), but also lets you work directly with the code. It offers a "design" view, an "HTML Tags" view, and a color-coded "Source" view.

It includes some site-management features, PHP and JavScript editing, and an easy built-in CSS manager.

Might be worth checking out. From what I've read it seems right up your alley.

Merry