I learned the old fashioned way. Windows 95 and the simple text editor. Sounds funny, Windows 95 and old fashion, in the same sentence, but that was 5 or 6 years ago and what seems like eons in terms of computing advances. With processors doubling in speed every year or so and WYSWYG editors advancing in capabilities, I'm wondering if I'm a dinosaur already :) Does anyone else code by hand ??
I code by hand. For me that is the fun part anyway. Figuring out how to make obscure looking commands do my bidding ! I run my own web design service as a part time business
www.iowawebmasters.com, and only as a hobby. (Critique it if you want, but it's never done ;P ) I don't ever expect to make a living doing web design. But with that in mind, I ENJOY doing the coding and getting the clean design in the code that can only be done by hand.
The majority of the websites I visit seem to use Frontpage, Dreamweaver, or some other code generating program. I don't like the idea of "having" to use the same program that generated the code to update a page, because it's an unreadable scrambled mess. The one exception I find is that Dreamweaver actually creates somewhat elegant code, but it's still bloated and sometimes obscure in what it's actually trying to do. I've tried them, and always get irritated that something isn't just right and end up working from the source code again anyway.
I usually start out designing a template page. Getting the basic layout of the page the way I want. I then decide which parts will be changed often and convert that to some sort of include file so that I can update ONE file to change ALL the pages at once. Usually this is some of the meta tags, and the copyright, and if I don't require css, then the <body > tag is also an include file. Usually a header / body / footer system. More or less, depending on the site.
Then I can just "copy" the template page and get to work on adding content for the site. Seems fast enough to me. Now you know how I do things. Any thoughts on which way is the best? Hand coding or WYSWYG ??