Dreamweaver vs Hand-coding

Best way to code a website?

When I first started out, I used Dreamweaver. I used it because I didn’t know how to write code.

This was a problem because I was letting a program auto-spit out code that I didn’t know of what quality it was. I soon found out too that Dreamweaver is after all just a program that easily makes mistakes. It does a lot of guess work, therefore, if you don’t keep an eye out, it creates errors that won’t validate and even breaks your design. It also spits out a lot of unnecessary junk like comments.

Dreamweaver made me lazy and sloppy. Like many designers who didn’t know any better, I thought all that mattered was that the site looked right on the front-end and didn’t have a care in the world for clean code.

As I continued learning and started caring about SEO-friendliness and the quality of my code, I cut Dreamweaver loose and switched over to Notepad. This forced me to continue learning and gave me precise control over my code. Now, I can write HTML and CSS fluently. They’re second languages to me now.

Eventually, Notepad wasn’t cutting it, but Dreamweaver was still too much. I now use Notepad++, which is basically an advanced version of Notepad. Now that I know how to code properly, I probably could go back and use Dreamweaver more effectively, I just don’t know why I’d want to.

What do you use?

What Do You Use to Code?

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Some programs are grouped because they’re essentially the Windows and Mac equivalents.