Danny's Design

In terms of WYSIWYG editors, probably the main three that are used are Dreamweaver, Kompozer and Nvu. I decided to include Nvu in the review because there is still a "stable" version of it that some people are still using. So if you are wondering which is the best of the three in terms of ease of use, features, price, and overall quality, here are my 2 cents.

Let's start with Nvu - it's free, and its basic. The features include a variety of languages to work in, a simple, yet effective site manager, and the tools necessary to legitimize a website. I've used this program on windows XP, Vista and on Ubuntu and I have to say that it is one of the most buggy programs I have ever used, although on Linux the program does seem to run better. So if you can get past the bugs and the crashes that it causes you will be able to create a website - for free! But there are a good deal of reasons why I believe that if you are going to be a serious web designer, but the bottom line is that if you are a beginner then you might not be html or css savvy enough to deal with the little annoyances that you might encounter due to the program's limited-ness. But hey you could always just pop a template in there and play around with it... it is free.

Kompozer is built on the program Nvu, so there are a lot of similarities. And honestly (at least for me) a lot of the same bugs (also tested on xp,vista, and ubuntu). Every once in a while it crashes and I will have to redo the last few changes I made. But it is a step up from Nvu. Did I mention it was also free?

Dreamweaver - expensive, but it is the program leading the web design industry. I own the CS4 version and I have tinkered with the CS3 version and I must say that the CS4 version is faster, more visually appealing and brings all the goods from CS3 (plus a couple new ones), and it seems more stable than the CS3 make. Essentially it's the best WYSIWYG editor out there, but the problem is that it is a hefty $200+ dollars.

To conclude I would have to say that if you have the dough to spend on dreamweaver and you want to be a serious web designer, go for it, its worth it. But if you only plan on making a basic web page and you don't want to break the bank I suggest signing up with godaddy and using a template. But if you want to learn html and css - play around with Kompozer or Nvu (whichever doesn't crash on your computer) and get acquainted.