XSitePro
XSitePro is a WYSIWYG web page editor that has many great reviews
and praise for its interface and ease of use for both beginners and
novice users. It is not free but costs only $197.00 with the
current $100 discount. Some of the features for XSitePro include
project based website design and management, menu design options
including breadcrumb trail, over 200 templates and 4,000 professional
clipart images, and global find and replace.
One feature that I found would be handy was the "web site notes"
function which pops up a note window where you can type your thoughts
of something you would like to add to your website or change.
This is I see would be a good feature because if you are working
on a certain section of your website and an idea comes to mind for
another section you can type in a quick note or reminder of something
to add later. Paypal, Adsense, and Amazon affiliate integration
is also a nice feature.
One disadvantage I found is that the 200 templates that come with the
program is not enough. There are however some companies that are
starting to offer more template downloads for XSitePro, and you can
also make your own with Photoshop if you are pretty artistic and
knowledgeable about template design.
One
review I found stated that XSitePro offers very easy website uploading,
which they say is not always a straightforward and simple process.
To upload a website all that is needed is to enter your domain
name, home directory, FTP server, username and password, select "Tools"
then "Publish" and your site is uploading immediately. I found
very little bad criticism regarding XSitePro and if I ever need to
purchase a web editor in the future this will be toward the top of my
list.
Mozilla Composer
Mozilla Composer is a free web editor that comes with the Firefox
browser. It is mostly a pre-CSS HTML editor. The "normal" mode is
the WYSIWYG interface which allows you to create and edit your webpage
and view changes. "Preview" mode allows you to see the appearance
of your page as it would appear in a Mozilla browser window and also
allows you to edit in this view. The "HTML source" mode allows
you to view and edit the code generated by the editor. "HTML
Tags" mode allows you to show a WYSIWYG format but with HTML tags
highlighted as a graphical representation.
The drag and drop editing does not allow you to drag an image and place
it in any spot on the page but creates an image tag where you dropped
it and according to the flow of the document. The editor does not
create the layout code to keep an image in the spot where it was
dropped thus requiring the user to use tables or manually entering
CSS code into the HTML source.
Another
disadvantage I found in the reviews of Composer is that if you are
using it for an HTML editor there is no way to position elements using
CSS in the "normal" mode of the editor. You need to know how to
write raw CSS code or just use tables for the layout of your page.
The tables are a pretty complete portion of Composer and can be
used solely if you do not know how to write CSS or HTML code.
Composer does however validate HTML code with no errors, which I have
found that errors during validating with WYSIWYG editors is fairly
common. Overall for a free WYSIWYG web editor, Composer is a decent
option for beginners learning to build a website but seasoned web
designers probably would not use this program due to the limited CSS
code options.
Microsoft Expression Web
Expression Web is only available for the Windows operating system and
replaces Microsoft's FrontPage web design application. Expression
Web has a fairly steep learning curve and is probably not recommended
for beginners. It supports all major web design standards such as
CSS, HTML, XHTML, XML, and W3C. CSS is the most widely used
because it separates the content on your site's pages from the
navigation, color schemes, and other design elements making updating
fast and easy.
A neat feature lets you
type a letter or two to select options from numerous pallates and then
drag "snippets", or small pieces of code, onto your page to add
different elements to it. Also you can right click on titles and
words to format them as hyper links, so a visitor to your website can
click on a word and it will take them directly to the website
corresponding to that word or title.
The only
serious problem I found during research with Expression Web is that it
lacks support for secure FTP file transfers for publishing your site to
the Web. You would need to use a separate program to to upload
your files and would also loose a feature of Expression Web that
optimizes code when uploading.
Overall I found that Expression Web
is a great program for novice web designers and a big step up from the
old FrontPage application.
