[Gllug] Web design

[John Southern]

On Wednesday 11 October 2006 19:25, Chris Bell wrote:
>    Is there a consensus on the current best web design tools and systems? I
> would like to create quality, but without excessive bloat.

A text editor really is the best.

If you want to avoid the code you could try Mozilla Composer which will let 
you build a page with simple drag & drop. The downside is the code will be 
awful.

A step further would be something like Quanta+ which while making you see some 
of the code, has the advantage over a text editor of letting you see a 
preview with just the click of an icon.

Bluefish is similar, but it is many months since I ran that one.

Testing is a pain as the majority still use IE and no matter what standards 
you follow, IE will break the site. There are fixes such as the holly hack to 
avoid most of the IE bugs.

Avoid Dreamweaver - the code is almost unreadable at times.

You can test on a Linux box by installing ie4linux which will give you three 
different versions all with java and flash9.

MySpace and Piczo have both produced a mass of pages that have no content and 
less design, but almost instant gratification in terms of something on the 
web with no effort. (Yes I have a daughter who has such a site :-(   )

CSS is great if you are changing the design (which initially, you will do a 
lot anyway) as they provide a single page to edit for the design side of 
things. ZenGarden is probably the standard everyone looks at, although at the 
moment I like the jello mold piefecta layouts for three column work that you 
can reduce the width.

The w3C site has the standard validator, but I always fail on strict XML and 
so stick to transitional.

Regards
John

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