Mac account to use it as it tries to force you to sign up for one when you start it up. You might be led into thinking that you need a. Template-based page creators iWebĬhances are you already have iWeb – it’s part of the iLife suite that comes with the Mac (I’m currently playing with iWeb ’06). Other budget WYSIWYG editors include the also-free Amaya and the $80 Freeway Express. Overall, KompoZer makes a good alternative to Dreamweaver if you’re on a tight budget. It also has a nice CSS editor built in, as well as FTP publishing and site management capabilities.
Unfortunately it’s a bit slow on Intel Macs, because it’s only available as a PPC application (at the time of writing).Īs well as full WYSIWYG editing, you can also switch to Source mode if you need to dip in and edit some HTML by hand. And that’s what counts, right? It’s stable, it has lots of features, and it hardly messes up your HTML at all (unlike some editors I could mention). It’s not the prettiest-looking app around, but it does a great job of editing web pages. KompoZer is a free, open-source WYSIWYG editor with a venerable lineage that can be traced back to the original Netscape Composer.
Other worthy apps in the text-based category include Aptana Studio (professional edition: $100, community edition: free), the free TextWrangler text editor, and your favourite UNIX text editor of choice, built right into your Mac! (Mine happens to be vim.) WYSIWYG editors KompoZer While not as full-featured as Coda, or as slick, skEdit does a decent enough job for the price. skEdit also features snippets – macros that you can use to quickly do common tasks, such as turn some text into a link. It also lets you do simple HTML auto-formatting, such as highlighting text and pressing Command-Option-B to bold it a feature sorely missing from Coda.Īnother nicety is the way you can open a remote folder on an FTP server, then edit and save the files as if they were local. It features syntax highlighting for most web file formats, including HTML, CSS, Perl, Python, ASP, and JavaScript – though, for some bizarre reason, not PHP. Where Coda is the Swiss army knife of text-based editing, skEdit gives you just the bare essentials: a capable editor, and a file uploader. skEditĪt the other end of the text-based spectrum is the $35 skEdit. Other really nice touches include a built-in terminal window for those times when you simply have to drop to a shell, and the built-in – and very nice-looking – reference books for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP.
Double-click the icon in Sites, and you’re back to working on your site, exactly where you left off. I particularly like the Sites feature that records everything about the current site you’re editing – open windows, your position in each file, and the connection to the FTP server – in a single, pretty-looking page icon. To this end, Coda does a fantastic job it’s intuitive, easy to use, looks great, and really speeds up the website building process. The idea of Coda is to have all the tools you need to build web pages – a text editor, a CSS inspector, a preview mode, and an FTP/SFTP/WebDAV uploader – all in one handy package. Panic’s Coda ($80) is a powerful text-based HTML and CSS editor that also features a file uploader. Let’s take a look at some example Mac apps in each category. Examples include iWeb, RapidWeaver and Sandvox. It’s usually not possible to flip to a text editing mode and edit your HTML page in its entirety. Rather than editing HTML pages, you build your pages using templates built into the app, then publish, or export, your finished site as HTML, CSS and images. These are a relatively new breed of web-building apps. Examples include Dreamweaver, KompoZer and Amaya. Under the hood, though, you’re still working with an HTML page, and can usually go in and edit the raw HTML if you need to. You can enter and format text, and drag images and other media into the page. These let you work with your web pages visually, much like using a word processor.
Examples include Coda, TextWrangler, and practically any text editor you can imagine! The editor may have some sort of preview facility so you can view your page visually as you go, but all the editing is done in text mode. With these editors you essentially work with the raw HTML and CSS code.
Web page editing software seems to me to fall into three broad categories these days: When it comes to web page editors, Adobe once again rules the posh end of the market with Dreamweaver ($400), which is great for both visual- and text-based page editing. I’ve already covered image editors in this post I delve into the murky and varied world of web page editing apps.
In this short series of posts I’m looking at Mac software that lets you build a decent website without costing the earth.