Gentle reader,
If you have come upon this page by chance, kindly note that it is a work in progress, one originally set up to hone my skills at web design.
What began as a lark, using Apple's own iWeb software to create a website for my wife's business, has morphed into a desire to learn proper web site creation. iWeb, while an elegant tool for page design, produces inelegant code. A savvy programmer would wince -- for instance -- at very notion of a separate CSS file for each web page, since it defeats much of the point of using CSS. Yet that is precisely what iWeb does.
iWeb was designed for the amateur who wants to create a web site without touching the underlying code. Indeed, it does not allow access to the code it compiles. To build poperly coded web sites, one needs to start by learning HTML and CSS and by using a good editor. I chose
Espresso and
Sublime Text. However, I still craved a tool favoring direct creation of visual design over keyboarding, a so-called "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) program. After all, the web has become a thoroughly visual medium, and I enjoyed the basic art of layout: choosing how to arrange fonts, colors, images and blocks of text directly on the screen. This was the charm of iWeb -- if one bypassed all templates and used it as a design tool proper. Mere coding remains a clumsy way to realize shapes on a monitor, at least to me.
Casting about for a replacement that would do more than my editors, I eventually alighted upon the rather awkwardly named Flux 3 -- now updated to
Flux VII. Developed by
The Escapers, a software team out of England (recently relocated to Australia), it offers a system that allows either designing with a code editor or with WYSIWYG tools. If you choose to manipulate the graphics directly, Flux structures the process in a way that will encourage you to think in terms of proper code creation. Those who want to move outside the boundaries of iWeb may find it a relatively steep learning curve, but that is the price of greater flexibility in design options and cleaner code.