An Introduction To Website Editors

A website editor is a software program that you use to create and change Web pages (HTML-based documents). It can be something as simple as the text editor that came with your computer or it can be something that creates the page right in front of you as you point and click. Low-level Web page editors are used to writing HTML code directly. High-level Web authoring programs provide complete WYSIWYG design with the ability (in varying degrees) to switch back and forth between the page layout and the HTML code.

If you design your pages using HTML then you will probably us a text editor of some sort. They come with a wide variety of options including templates, spell checkers, color-coding and much more. If you don't want to use HTML and would prefer building websites using technologies such as PHP, ASP, JAVA, CSS, Cold Fusion or if you want to create a simple page quickly, then you probably will need to use a more complex editor. Editors like FrontPage and Composer are easy to use but don't allow you to add complex things such as JavaScript and DHTML without using their text editor option. A better option for creating complex websites is Dreamweaver as by default it supports PHP, ASP, JAVA, CSS, Cold Fusion and other formidable technoligies.

Also called an authoring tool, an HTML editor is a software program that inserts HTML code as you create a HTML file. Some editors will provide a word processing GUI enabling users to create HTML documents without knowing any HTML code. These are often referred to as WYSIWYG Editors.

WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) HTML editors provide an editing interface, which resembles how the page will be displayed in a web browser. Some editors, such as ones in the form of browser extensions allow editing within a web browser. Because using a WYSIWYG editor does not require any HTML knowledge, they are easier for an average computer user to get started with.