I have had some publishers write me about the challenge of learning HTML. I’m now curious how many here are hand coders, how many use the WYSIWYG editors, how many use text editors, or other software? Please take a moment to answer the poll.


Michelle O'Grady
Affiliate Marketing Manager
Lightspeed Affiliate Program

I use special software, text editors, hand code and WYSIWYG HTML editors for my sites.

Notepad and Dreamweaver. I am a little rough around the edges. I get it done but not as effectively as I should be able too, honestly.

I hand code and always have. Have been doing HTML so long, that Netscape Composer was pretty much the only editor at the time.

WYSIWYG editors serve a great purpose... but when you throw in PHP, memory caching applications, templating systems, etc... it's better for me to just dive right in.

I hand code too. It gives me maximum control over the code and I can clearly understand when something goes wrong, because it's all known.

With WYSIWYG it's definitely faster to create pages, but in the end if and when something goes wrong, the amount of time spent in correcting the problem is a lot greater when compared to a cleaner hand-coded code.

Also, these days when page loading speed is an important factor for SEO and visitor experience, hand-coded html tends to be smaller since there's no extra (auto-inserted) tags.

As an added advantage, coding pages with XHTML combined with CSS makes the page less error prone and faster.

XHTML is a valid form HTML and gets processed faster as a result.

But it's quite time consuming in the beginning to code in XHTML, but the time spent in the initial effort pays off later on because it reduces page bugs to zero, contributes to the faster loading speeds of a page.

And NO, XHTML is not for purists, anyone who thinks that hasn't worked with it and is quite naive when it comes to fully understanding the purpose of advance technology.

I use homesite. Why? I had dreamweaver, but I just didn't like it. Waaay back when, I used frontpage but people started laughing, so I gave that up. I like homesite. It's not fussy and it works for what I need. Usually, what I need isn't much.

Hi Mr. B,

Welcome to the forums. I've used Frontpage and Microsoft Word (*shudder*) a few times. The idea of making a page 3x the size of any other page I've ever made just isn't appealing to me. Not to mention, I could do without the <meta name="http-beverage-while-working" value="Redbull> type tags.

I'm a hand coder too, but do have Homesite and Dreamweaver to speed things up more. Too many domains to pound stuff out for ya know ;)