Surfing The World Wide Waves, a weekly article

1st Page 2000

One of the most powerful free html editing softwares I have found is first page 2000 by EVRsoft. If you're tired of using frontpage which always loses your navigation and adds so many extra tags why not begin experimenting with 1st page 2000. It is very intuitive to use and although it may be a little bit of a challenge dealing with the html code it soon becomes habit.

It has four modes, easy, expert, hardcore and normal. Although at the beginning you may use the easy mode after refreshing your coding memory you can use the other modes depending on your level of comfort. Interesting features are the code assistants for when creating tables, asp scripts and more. A feature which I find quite useful is the feature for setting up images to display properly with an alternative text and more.

One of the strong points about the software is that you can work on several pages at once. This speeds up the process when creating navigation within the site. If you're used to coding then using the server side includes (SSI) are very interesting when creating the site navigation but that is another topic. In continuing on this it means that if you've decided that you want to change code but haven't used the SSI yet then it is one of the best softwares to do so. I particularly enjoyed using this software because as a piece of freeware it is very powerfull and you are in full control of the layout of your site.

Although this software has many good sides one of the drawbacks which I have encountered is the lack of a wysiwyg "What you see is what you get" option to edit directly onto the page itself. It would make certain tasks more simple, for example when there is an error in code being taken straight there is more interesting as in Dreamweaver. Another element which could be improved is the ability to upload directly to your server rather than having to use a second program.

Apart from the software side the website associated with this product is full of useful tools for webmasters such as PHP, ASP, style sheets and many other more specific options.

Articles by Richard Azia unless otherwise indicated.

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