My parents bought a domain name for me about a year ago, and we haven't signed on with anyone to host it yet because I've had no use for it, but I plan on throwing something together on of these days. For any of you guys who hosts your own site, what software do you use to build it? I have no clue when it comes to this stuff, so help me out! Cory

TextPad is a great text editor with syntax highlighting and pre-made tags. My choice. but you do have to know HTML to use it.

Or, if you're really masochistic, Notepad, which doesn't have syntax highlighting nor pre-made tags.

1st Page 2000 by Evrsoft is a free WYSIWYG editor. Can't go wrong there. :-)

People I trust have been recommending Serif's WebPlus 6, but Serif now has version 7, which is a part of Web Page Maker. It still costs only $49.99.

I say only, because Dreamweaver costs several hundred dollars. I'd recommend that only if you mean to do web authoring more intensively. It has all the bells and whistles, but you have to learn it.

Finally, check alt.html FAQ. The FAQ and the newsgroup are a great repository of knowledge about web authoring.

Attached Link: http://www.boogiejack.com

I hand coded my site, Frontpage, Dreamweaver and the other wysiwyg's bloat the code too much, and since you pay for space on a host, file size is critical. Learming html is extremely easy, the best book to get that explains 'everything' is "Web Design made Easy" by Dennis Gaskill, you can get it from his site and lots of other goodies, see the link above. I had the basic coding in place in about an hour after reading his book, and a full blown site within two days, coding it myself.

...And you can edit your site in Notepad.

Thanks a lot for the help guys... I have some prior knowledge in HTML, so buying a book and doing it that way would probably be no problem. I may go that way or get Web Page Maker, since it's so cheap. Cory

Attached Link: http://www.exit0.com/ns/home.html

The composer in Netscape works pretty good but its wysiwyg (what you see is what you get). It will reveal the code but you can't edit in the text portion. Front page does nasty things like declaring a font and scale every line. Really makes every page huge. The best image map editor I used was the 97 version of html assistant pro by brooklyn north. They have a free 30 day trial at the link I provided, but I haven't tried the 2000 version yet.

DreamWeaver is always a good choice...great interface...but it's rather pricey, if i remember correctly.

Attached Link: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tut/

I do a lot of writing and correcting with just a text editor. One of the best and first online tutorials for writing HTML is from the Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction. This tutorial has been online since 1994. It teaches standard wwwc html code readable by all browsers.

Recommend you look for free templates. search the web, lots of very good ones ready made. Then study their source code. ie,view,source. my .02

Photoshop and imageready have a lot of web-functionailty built in. I also like adobe's golive but it might be bit pricey if you didn't get it in a bundle with photoshop etc. Coding by hand is a waste of time, but it doesn't hurt to know how to debug.

I use Adobe Golive 5. Bought it at Ebay for 70 dollars (legal version with manual and box and registered). Just love working with Golive.

I'm involved with the creation of www.mxlos.org and we usually use Macromedia Dreamweaver MX for building that site. I just love Dreamweaver, great program. It's got wysiwyg fuctionalities for people who don't know much about coding but it's also got a coding mode to program your site yourself (with color coding ofcourse, for easier navigation through your code) or even a split mode where you can type your coding and directly see the result on screen. It supports html, css, php/mysql, javascript and probably lots more that I haven't used yet.

Attached Link: http://www.wdvl.com

I'd go with dreamweaver as well, Frontpage is full of bloatware and microsoft tie-in to try and force ISPs to support non-standard extensions. I'm not averse to hand coding and have dreamweaver set to use my favourite editor (Ultra Edit 32) as the code editor rather then it's own editor. Erlik makes a good point about price, I use photoshop, fireworks, dreamweaver and flash and they mount up to a lot of money spent. I'd suggest using notepad (or maybe Ultra Edit - it's a low cost app) and either a decent HTML book or using some on line resources (the web developers virtual library (linked) is one of my favourites)

If you're going to hand code, I recommend getting something like HomeSite, CuteHTML, or BBEdit -- they're like NotePad with time-saving features designed for the webmaster.

Homesite isn't bad I used to use it a fair amount, but moved on to Ultraedit as it has mark up for PERL, C, DXL and various other languages I have to use as well as HTML.

i learnt to hand code first - now use dreamweaver - i've found it bloats the code less than other programs. i've found that having learnt to code by hand helps with tweaking pages created by wysiwyg programs

I've used a few different programs over the years, starting with Notepad and other text editors and now I use a combination of Homesite/ColdFusion Studio & Dreamweaver MX...mainly because I do ColdFusion programming (similar to ASP & PHP). The newest version of Dreamweaver is MX 2004 and it rocks! Its great for using with CSS and does not bloat your code at all. Its pricey, I know...$399? US for a full version (the MX (think 2002) may be much cheaper on Ebay now). Check out www.macromedia.com/usergroups. There are quite a few around the world (200-300) supporting Dreamweaver, Flash, etc. Ryan