eHelpThe HTML Beginner's Guide and CSS Beginner's Guide at HTML Dog are step-by-step tutorials for doing basic HTML and CSS. We recommend them highly. If you're already using Dreamweaver and want to understand HTML and CSS better, do the exercises in Dreamweaver's code view.
This is the best-supported program for creating web pages at Cal Poly Pomona. It is available at low cost to faculty and staff through the Macromedia Site License and at a somewhat higher educational discount through Bronco Bookstore. Support is available through Studio Six, and the Web Team will help you with problems caused by web pages created in Dreamweaver.
This program, also from Macromedia, and also available through the campus site license, allows you to edit existing web pages and create new ones. It is best used on a site already set up with Dreamweaver to use Dreamweaver templates, where it allows people with little or no web experience to add or modify content.
A part of the Mozilla Suite, Composer is an adequate program for making web pages, and it is free. It comes with the Mozilla browser and email programs.
For the geeks among us, there is nothing better than editing the HTML directly, and there are a number of good programs for doing that. On Macintosh, the best choice is BBedit, which is around $200. For Windows, a respected standard is Macromedia Homesite, at around $100, but two notable free alternatives are HTML-Kit and 1st Page 2000.
On Windows, a highly respected CSS editor is Topstyle, which can also be used for editing HTML. It is around $80, but Topstyle Lite is free.
Most of the programs in Office are able to either save or publish files as HTML. That distinction is important. When you save a file, the Office application includes every bit of information that would have been saved in the original .doc, or .xls, or .ppt. Such files can only be read by Internet Explorer (or by the application that created it), and will sometimes cause other browsers to crash.
Publishing a file, on the other hand, keeps only the information that can be displayed by web browsers (discarding, for example, the equations in Excel). By careful attention to the items in the "Publish" dialog box, it is possible to export a web file that is usable in any browser. Even so, the files are difficult to modify, and far larger than they need to be, so this option should be avoided if possible.
As with Office, it is possible with Frontpage to create web pages that can be viewed in any browser, and that are only somewhat bloated. But the Intranet does not support Frontpage Extensions, so many of the advantages of Frontpage are not available, and the Web Team will not deal with problems caused by pages created in Frontpage.
Note: The information on this page is supplied as is without expressed or implied endorsements and/or warranties of any kind by Cal Poly Pomona.
