Cool for coding
Written: Jun 30 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: easy to use, creates clean code
Cons: doesn't allow for previewing frames, better for HTML editing than for designing
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| bethy's Full Review: Adobe Spectra 1.0 (Media Only) for PC (VL-10SPE-NT... |
This past week, I started a new job (finally) as a web designer at a small company. Among the perks of this position are all the cool programs on the computer I've inherited. I've played with a lot of these programs before, but Homesite was new to me.
Before this job, I was a strict hand coder. Notepad was my biggest friend. Hey, I had the time to hand code, I didn't have a job. Handcoding is still close to my heart, but I'm trying to ween myself off of it. Clients have budgeted certain amounts of time to get projects done, and combing through Notepad isn't necessarily the best way to keep within the budget, at least where text editing is concerned.
So when I had a huge amount of text, including links, to deal with, I copied it into Homesite. For formatting text, it's very effective and easy to use. You can highlight blocks of text and format them as desired. Yes, you can do this in FrontPage as well, but here, the HTML is much cleaner. However, selecting a font only selects that font. If you select "verdana," it will only input "verdana," not "verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif." It's possible that you can tell Homesite to include the rest of the font family, but I haven't found where yet.
I wouldn't recommend using Homesite for more complicated design purposes. I'm not a big fan of frames, but some clients want them, and Homesite doesn't allow users to preview frames in its "design view." It has also distorted pages in its design view that appear fine in a browser.
Some cool features:
You can have a bunch of files open at once and can toggle among them. Homesite is kind of like MS Excel in this sense; it has tabs at the bottom that let you skip back and forth easily from file to file. Also, if you have edited a file but haven't saved your changes, the tab at the bottom becomes a different color when you skip to a new file. Very handy.
You can switch back and forth between views. FrontPage also allows users to do this, and I actually like FrontPage's way better. Homesite has a browse option, which I suppose acts like FrontPage's preview option that lets you view how your file would look on the page, but when I've selected browse, I usually see a blank screen.
You can customize it to make your coding quick. For instance, if you want, you can choose to have Homesite insert the closing tag after you open a tag. This can be helpful or annoying, depending on what you're doing, so it's good to be able to switch it on and off. There are numerous other options you can turn on to help expedite your coding as well.
Overall, I like the clean code Homesite creates, I like its ease of use, and I like the amount of options it gives users. For people who are used to doing a lot of coding, it's a great timesaver. And for people who are new to designing web pages, I think Homesite is a pretty good place to start. Generally, though, I'd stick to this program for editing HTML.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
bethy
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Member: Beth
Location: NY
Reviews written: 60
Trusted by: 36 members
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