Website design software

[Chris French]

In message , Bert Coules writes

In part it's probably been driven by changing ways of accessing email.

e.g not long ago we had a couple of computers in the house, and would normally read email on those. Collecting via pop3 and storing it locally.

Nowadays, as well as more computers, we have smartphones and are accessing email via different devices, all over the place (Nowadays I normally read emails on my phone, and often write there as well, unless it;s longer and more complicated, or happen to be at the computer.

So I use IMAP for accessing my mail, - and that requires emails to be stored on the remote server. I do still run a client locally, to download and store emails in a local archive. But in reality I rarely accessing it using that. I find on the computer, I'll tend to use the web client instead.

And of course, lots of people use email services such as Gmail, Hotmail (as was) etc. andon't ever download locally anyway.

[Bert Coules]

I've been looking at this and it seems very good. I'm going to try the free older version, but I'm slightly concerned that the site lists Internet Explorer as a system requirement: I have IE but never use it, preferring Firefox. Well, I'll see what happens.

[John Rumm]

It also has (or at least had - unless they have made big improvements recently) a habit of creating code that is not standards compliant, and that only renders well in safari.

[Dave W]

When I used Serif PagePlus drawing program some years ago, it kept popping up a plea to upgrade every so often, so beware!

[newshound]

+1

• lots!

[Bert Coules]

Thanks for that. Perhaps I'm being unduly fussy.

[Lawrence]

Internet

preferring

You don't need IE. Older versions give you the option of previewing in IE, that's all. I use it a lot.

[Bert Coules]

I've been playing with the free version and finding it very good, if perhaps over-complicated for my fairly simple needs. At the moment, I prefer it to the other offline programs I've sampled.

[John Rumm]

That is nothing to do with dreamweaver, and everything to do with what the designed chooses to put on the page.

Dreamwever is actually quite civilised when it comes to generating reasonable HTML, and also keeping its fingers out of embedded hand coded stuff.

Yup, can't argue with that, but don't blame the software!

[www.GymRatZ.co.uk]

I used KompoZer too back in the day when my e-commerce site html pages were "auto generated" by a product called EcBuilder and I wanted to modify stuff.

Also used Dreamweaver 4 but now it's all script stuff way beyond my means so I have a man that can and don't worry about messing things up :)

[MM]

Bit late in the day in replying, but the best website designer software for me is by far and away NetObjects Fusion. I got a version for free on a cover-mounted DVD several years ago and have upgraded it ever since. It is a doddle to use for novices, yet you can produce sophisticated websites in a flash. Totally point and click, and pretty intuitive in the way it does things.

I haven't updated it for quite some time now, as the version I've currently got installed is more than enough for my purposes.

Go here for more details:

There is even a free starter version for downloading:

MM

[Dave W]

OK, I only looked at a trial version of Dreamweaver, but considered that most of its features I didn't want and couldn't afford. I'm glad to hear it doesn't touch embedded hand coded stuff, but if you can hand code, why use Dreamweaver?

[John Rumm]

You can use it as a basic context sensitive HTML editor, and its also good with CSS styles - giving decent property based editors etc. So if you have a layout or design in mind, its a quick way of defining all the layout elements of your pages. And reams and reams of nested DIVs with attached styles ain't much fun to code by hand IMHO.