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Best Web Authoring Application?
NotHereOrThere asks: "I want to setup a small business web site and I'm trying to choose a web authoring application. I'm a software developer, so technical complexity doesn't scare me, but I've never developed for the web other than some very simple HTML pages. My main requirements are ease of use and presentation quality. What do Slashdot readers recommend? Any recommendations for a hosting service?"
I've just started using NVU 1.0PR, and so far, I really like it. It is extremely simple, and generates very good (HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 compliant) code. It won't do anything too fancy for you, but supports templates, javascript events, and external style sheets. I'd suggest giving it a whirl.
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
Why not try an Open Source Content Management System like Plone or Mambo? Being a technical guy you will probably find that the only way to produce a good looking site is to do it by hand, learning the intricacies of HTML/CSS and latest graphics tricks, and that's a lot more work than meets the eye. That's why those things are nice - they give you a more or less professional look to start with.
Oh, and for hosting I recommend OpenHosting, of course!
I was going to mod you up, but I'll comment.
I say: if you're going for standards compliance, at this point, you almost *have* to hand-code your pages. If you're running Windows, go for TopStyle. It includes HTML Tidy integration and a number of other features.
The problem is, if you're doing more than simple HTML -- and you plan to keep it updated by hand -- these days, Dreamweaver and similar products just boil down to fancy text editors.
Their CSS features are far slower than simply hand-coding the tags, unlike if you were doing this in 1996, where bold and italic and colors would cut it. Dreamweaver, for example, seems to have a horrid understanding of CSS and XHTML, that is to say, you can hand-code, or you can use its "features", but don't plan on both, it's a headache.
I use to use Fireworks for a lot of "automated" web graphics, now I hand-code everything and use Fireworks for the design elements, but no table-based graphics. Web authoring has become so, well, complex -- it's not just HTML any more -- that no product made for the Old Web really cuts it any more than notepad. I'd die to have a program like Fireworks that would export my raw graphics as properly coded CSS, that compiled layers into divs properly, and that -- say I used a rounded corner with 75% transparency -- would write out the CSS3 tags for corners and opacity and have the code degrade properly for browsers that don't support it. Unfortunately, this requires more of a web-document compiler than generator, something more intelligent, that just doesn't exist right now. But someday.
The first thing you should probably do is pickup a copy of The Non-Designer's Design Book. It'll give you a great head start on typography and the use of space and save you some considerable face later.
After that, what I usually do is take a piece of paper and draw out your initial ideas and from there, use a trial version of Dreamweaver to codify your design. Then save it as a template and purchase a copy of Macromedia's Contribute to make pages and keep them up-to-date.
If coding by hand's more your style (it is for me), I'd still highly recommend using Contribute to keep your pages up-to-date. It's easy to use and (more importantly) is hard to royally screw up things with.
For inspiration, look at sites you like, but realize that flashy isn't necessarily the best user experience.
Good Luck.
For some strange reason, everybody thus far decided to suggest numerous windows applications.
Well, I use Quanta Plus (http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/).
It's an excellent environment once you get it configured the way you like it. It has four MDI modes (like GIMP's every-window-for-itself, or all in one window, and different styles, etc), it has a colour picker (which sooo many web authoring apps lack), it supports dozens and dozens of syntaxes (scripting, programming, markup, etc.) and it's excellent in terms of project organization.
It's made for KDE, though. So you might have to get a few dependencies here and there (- understatement if you don't run KDE). But I feel it's worth it (albeit I DO run KDE).
I use is solely for source editing, but it also has a visual editor. I don't know how competent the visual editor is, but the source editor is excellent. It has autocomplete and all that jazz.
I never really got into vi and emacs and all that, but I think this is much better for the task at hand.
- shazow
Several other posters have suggested Dreamweaver as the best. I'd like to counter that.
I'm primarity a C++ application developer who one in a while is tasked with making a website (or rather the frontend to a application I'm developing). Having zero graphic design skills, I tried Dreamweaver.
At first I loved it for its WYSIWYG capabilty; the code it produces is relatively clean. For a while it was great. Then I started doing more complex CSS stuff, like floating divs, etc. That's where Dreamweaver falls apart.
The WYSIWYG part of Dreamweaver can't cope with floating divs, and other complex constructs. The WYSIWYG rendering became a complete mess. The code was still OK, but really, the whole point of using Dreamweaver is the WYSIWYG abilities. So Dreamweaver is reduced to an average editor and IDE. Ho hum.
So now, I've returned to the traditional text editor + preview in mozilla, and I'm faster now than I was in dreamweaver.
I guess what I'm saying is that I outgrew Dreamweaver, and alot sooner than I expected. SO before plunking down the cash for dreamweaver, download the trial and make sure it can handle everything you intend throw at it.
Bah. I'm a huge fan of Dreamweaver.
I know some good people swear by it, but the thing that makes me crazy about apps like Dreamweaver and GoLive is that a lot of alleged designers use them as an excuse to remain ignorant of the underlying technology.
When I asked one designer to clean up her voluminous and chaotic markup and to fix the browser-related issues I had noticed, she told me that she was "a web designer, not a web programmer", and that she didn't really understand HTML and CSS so well. I rolled my eyes so hard I had to get an doctor to unstick them for me.
My tip for designer wannabes out there: use the fancy tools like Dreamweaver to speed along things you already know how to do manually. Clothing designers understand fabric and can sew. Print designers understand typography and the arcane details of n-color presses. Web designers do not get special permission to be clueless. Indeed, given how quickly web technologies evolve compared to other media, they have a special obligation to keep on top of the tech.