Someone mentioned Microsoft Expressions and I felt it was time for a casual pole of what web building software do you use? Some options I can think of right off:

Notepad -- Classic and still functional
Dreamweaver -- My person favorite although the CSS layout in Design mode fails me most of the time
Front Page -- My nemesis
Expressions -- My new nemesis *grin -- although seriously I haven't tried it.
Contribute -- I really hate Contribute with a passion
Coffee Cup
Web Builder Software online such as Geocities
Adobe Go Live - -Now extinct but I imagine someone is still out there using it

I am currently using Dreamweaver 8.  I'm a certified expert/developer in it twice after doing some beta work for Adobe on their exam.  I've been certified in this particular application since MX and I'm comfortable with it and I've taught it for three years - hmm, or four - anyway - by now I'm very good at fixing most of its bugs.

The one application on the list I really do not like is a system I helped put in place for content managers at our community college web site where I work, Adobe Contribute.  This program may still provide a whole lot of function inexpensively for someone wanting to run a very basic web site.  For us at the college it has been an unmitigated nightmare.  First we had to install it and train 50 non-computer savvy people how to use it. 

That done we then get a enormous amount of phone calls everyday, "now how do I do xyz again? can't you just do it for me?"  Then the woeful panic phone calls, "I broke it and now my page won't work! What did I do to it!?"

Contribute generates junk code and it refuses to undo it's evil handy work.  Our end users make a variety of changes to the page, then decide they want something else and endlessly apply styles.  Contribute often doesn't fully remove or does a bad job of removing the last style or code.  A lot of pages that are being sent my way have trashed out code.  I simply have to go through and remove excessive tags.  Ironically our heavy duty style sheet does all the work for our end users, they do not need to add a single style but they just won't leave it alone and cried so pitifully that I was required to allow them to add and access the style sheet - which has sort of trashed out the entire web site. (Also Contribute sometimes has files checked out or locked and doesn't undo that lock and we have to go onto the server and manually remove the .lck files.)

When the bureaucracy at the college looked at buying new copies of Contribute I've brought up the need for a cost/bennefit analysis because we could actually pay a full time employee to make all the changes to the site cheaper then updating our Adobe licensing for Contribute whose price doubled after the Macromedia aquisition. 

Recently the college opened a job position they hoped I would fill as assistant webmaster (taking over the entire web site).  Because of their top down philosophy (we'll create a group of 30 people who don't know what Google is and they will tell you how to build the web site - and we want 50,000 pages done in six months); not only did I not take on the job (they offered me an extra $1,000 a year), but I didn't even apply. 

So what software are you using?
Why are you using it?
How long have you been using it for?
Would you recommend it to others?

.keeping {
it-real: -7 :-) }

html kit
For some of my older sites an older version of FP

PS Pad.... cause its free!!!! (and essentially prettier than notepad)

TextPad

have't found a text editor for unix that i like, yet.

having said that, what about all the software that actually makes a site work, like a web server and server side apllications. Somehow I feel these are much more important. So I'll let you know my favourites there:

Apache - preferably on unix
MySQL
PHP

Northie wrote:

TextPad

have't found a text editor for unix that i like, yet.

having said that, what about all the software that actually makes a site work, like a web server and server side apllications. Somehow I feel these are much more important. So I'll let you know my favourites there:

Apache - preferably on unix
MySQL
PHP

And a huge second on that one.

not forgetting of course, that this is primarily a newbies forum...so applications are perhaps a different (though worthwhile!) thread?

matte wrote:

not forgetting of course, that this is primarily a newbies forum...so applications are perhaps a different (though worthwhile!) thread?

very true, but consider the answer dave might give:

"Joomla"

because joomla literally builds web pages and is a mixture of all the technologies we've discussed here

vim (vi Improved) a strictly text based text editor that you get for free with Linux, FreeBSD, etc...  I'm a hand coder, so this does the job just fine for me.

Obviously this doesn't show me how the page looks, so I use Firefox with Firebug and HTML Validator plug-ins during the design phase (checking with other browsers when I complete initial design).

As far as servers, I go with the basic LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) configuration.

Just by the by and off topic to the point where it could still be on topic.... isnt there a web developer version of linux? ye know, one that comes with all the fun bits that we all enjoy so much (LAMP configuration basically)?

Ryan_steyn wrote:

Just by the by and off topic to the point where it could still be on topic.... isnt there a web developer version of linux? ye know, one that comes with all the fun bits that we all enjoy so much (LAMP configuration basically)?

probably - but i use ubuntu with comes with loads of stuff pre installed and is p*ss easy to intall stuff like apahce, php, mysql and phpmyadmin

Pretty much all versions of Linux have everything you need for a LAMP setup.  I'm using openSuSE 10.2 here and at home, and one of the configuration options available is something to the effect of "Web Server (LAMP)".  Our web pages (we don't serve up our own, but use Pair.com's server) are on FreeBSD which is another open-source UNIX OS.  It otherwise has the same setup, so I guess you could call it FAMP.

I have heard lots of good things about ubuntu, i have been keen to try it outbut just havent the time or bandwidth to download it... perhaps i will just email Mark Shuttleworth and ask him to send a nice packaged version , i ave read the installation instructions for php and apache on linux and it doesnt seem complicated at all... despite popular belief

I use "Nvu", it's a WYSIWYG web builder.  It's FREE too, which is always nice. Have been using it for around 5 years now and am happy with it. I agree on FP, that was crap.  FP added a bunch of un-needed code if I remember correctly. Has anyone used "XStandard", another free WYSIWYG editor?  The editor generates clean XHTML Strict or 1.1, and uses CSS for formatting,  I tried using it, but am a little confused. It uses your browser to make the pages.