I've been building websites since 1994, when I got my first job helping to port the Perseus Project to the embyronic WWW. I've never taken a class or workshop, and I've taught workshops myself. How'd I learn? Forget Frontpage, Pagemill, Dreamweaver and the rest. I've tried them, and none of them have all the features and ease of use of Pagespinner, a shareware program for the Mac that's been available since about '95. New features are constantly being added.
Things I love about Pagespinner:
~ It never clutters your documents with redundant and unnecessary class declarations and hidden codes that don't actually do anything. Pages designed in Pagespinner are often faster-loading than those built in commercial programs.
~ Content is displayed in the editor fairly WYSIWYG, but the tags are there too, fully editable, colored gray and smaller so they don't get in the way. Spans, divs, table tags, IMG etc are color coded so you can spot 'em at a glance.
~ Show/hide a continuously updating display of what your page will look like in a side window.
~ Pulldown menus include handy wizards for selecting and tweaking CSS, colors, common scripts like rollovers, and for the old-fashioned folks, tables and imagemaps.
~ Great examples library whose code you can copy/paste/edit into your document. I learned almost everything I know this way, and I'm about to tackle the PHP section.
~ FTP from within Pagespinner.
~ 100-page notebook for storing and retrieving commonly-used snippets.
~ A special tag clipboard: easily cut/copy/paste the start and end tag around a selection with a keystroke.
~ Like Photoshop, all the advanced stuff is there for experts -- PHP, Javascript, CSS, etc -- but a novice can use Pagespinner without worrying about or being intimidated by that stuff.
~ $29 is an extremely reasonable cost for shareware of this quality; it was about the first one I ever paid for.
Other users may also like the companion applications, Camspinner (for designing webpages using webcams) and Mapspinner (quick and easy imagemap-building utility).
Sorry, PC users. You're out of luck on this one; Pagespinner is Mac-only.
