Web design and development can take several forms, each with their loyal following, I stick with more of a basic text editor, while others prefer a more "drag and drop" approach.

Adobe Dreamweaver is a pretty popular tool amongst developers for getting their sites developed. Dreamweaver is similar to Microsoft Frontpage but in my opinion, significantly better. Dreamweaver and Frontpage are both "What You See is What You Get" editors (WYSIWYG). They're pretty much designed so that you can pretty much lay out a website much like you would set up a document in Word. The software takes what you lay out and creates the HTML and Stylings behind the scene. Some people would call this easier than handwriting it, and while I can see why they do, I must respectfully disagree.

I do all of my web development work from scratch using nothing more than a simple text editor much like notepad for Windows. I feel that by doing it by hand, not only do you have a lot more control over the layout of the code, but you also gain a better understanding of why things work the way they do, and where everything you need to know in the code is. WYSIWYG editors aren't perfect and sometimes require manual code adjustments to set things where you want them to be set. I feel that it's simply easier to find the "problem" areas in code that you wrote yourself than it is to find the spot in code that was literally written by a piece of software. I personally like to have full control over the code of my sites and just feel that I lose a lot of that control if I move over to a WYSIWYG editor.

I would recommend using notepad to anyone who is just getting into web design for one simple reason. I believe you learn more by writing the code yourself. You'll learn better code styling and layout, as well as how the language works, and why it works the way it does. If after that you would rather use something like Dreamweaver, you'll be better off since you'll know the basics and at that point are more just using Dreamweaver to potentially speed things up.

Now I tend to refuse to use Notepad for my development, especially since a lot of it is done on my Macbook Pro, but there are a schloo of great text editors out there that will trump Notepad any day of the week, so I'll close this out by listing a few that you can go about and try.

Notepad++ (Windows)

Notepad++ is a free open-source app that does everything that Notepad can do, plus more. It contains syntax highlighting, control over the text layout, tabs, and the ability to install and manage plugins to extend its base functionality.

jEdit (Windows, Mac, Linux)

jEdit is similar to Notepad++ but is built with Java so it is compatible and useable on all 3 major platforms (Windows, Mac, & Linux). It features many of the same capabilities as Notepad++ including plugins, syntax highligting and tabs.

TextWrangler (Mac)

TextWrangler is a text editor for OS X that features syntax highlighting and a list view (similar to tabs but lists the files on the side). It's lightweight but lacks some of the more advanced features that jEdit and Notepad++ support.

TextMate (Mac)

TextMate is similar to TextWrangler but is significantly more powerful with an advanced feature set. It supports what almost seems like the standard syntax highlighting, ability to pair brackets, svn support, regular expression (grep) support, and many others. The one downside is that TextMate is not free, it costs around $50 for a license, but depending on your use, it might be worth it to you. It does come with a 30 day trial.

Coda (Mac)

This is my editor of choice. It has an extensive list of features and my favorite being built in FTP and SSH / SFTP support which makes uploading to your web server quick, easy, and painless. Among its other features are tabs, syntax highlighting, code support (will show you the function arguments to help you on your way) as well as smart editing (will finish lines with quotation marks, etc as needed). This, like TextMate is not free, Coda costs $99, but its a great piece of software and helps make managing the code between my Mac and the web server easier. It also supports help with css keywords and styles for those who might need some help with CSS.

So, what do you use when doing web development? Something like Dreamweaver, or a more hands-on approach with a basic text editor?

Tags: webdevelopment, programming, code