Suggestions for WYSIWYG Program Please

Hello. I'm happy enough with most of my xhtml and css coding - still lots to learn but have a 0real good grounding and thabk you to many on this forum who have helped when I needed it.

Now I find myself wanting learn a good quality wysiwyg program for creating web sites. My friend uses dreamweaver but when I look at the code it's based on tables and I really hope to find an editor that I can use to create a website from scratch that 0would create reasonable quality code behind the scenes.

Can anyone offer any advice? If it were free then great but I'd happily look at0 all optios so if there's a good product that costs money I'm sure I'd look at it.

Many thanks for any and all advice.

I quite like Visual Site Designer from Coffee Cup software.. Not free, but there is a trial version..

In reply to a post by smiffy12:

. My friend uses dreamweaver but when I look at the code it's based on tables and I really hope to find an editor that I can use to create a website from scratch that 0would create reasonable quality code behind the scenes.

Humm, DW cs4 does not produce code based on tables. If you want to code in table sure dw will allow you same if you want use asp/php or use code using divs instead of tables..

Try out the 30 day trial @ adobe

What sort of websites do you want to create? Simple sites with just a few pages or more complex sites such as e-commerce sites?

Either way, you should stick to hand-coded HTML and CSS as much as possible. If you want to create complex sites with a database at the back-end, you should look at frameworks such as Ruby on Rails.

Thank you to all for the replies. Re micksharpe, w
Fairly straightforward sites with sub menu for now and hoping to add a shop in the future. Looking forward to your suggestions. Manyt thanks

Thanks to all who replied. I've downloaded the demo of dreamweaver and it looks a mountain to learn so think I'll need to invest in a good book - any suggestions?

I've a good grasp of XHTML and CSS so the basic coding side I can understand, the software looks a bit frightening though, hence the suggestion of any tutorial book would be gratefully received.

Take a look at Nvu before you splash out on Dreamweaver. I tend to hand-code all my HTML and CSS rather than use a WYSISYG editor. For the back-end stuff, I use Ruby on Rails but this would be overkill for creating very simple websites. If you don't mind learning a programming language, you should take a look at either Sinatra or Camping. Both use the Ruby programming language and make programming simple websites very easy. For programming support, stackoverflow is a very useful resource. For Ruby on Rails tutorials, RailsCasts is the place to go. The people on stackoverflow should be able to point you to good tutorials for Sinatra and Camping.

I've just come across Amaya - looks promising.

Thanks MichSharpe, I'll have a look at both of these before trying too hard with freamweaver.

Appreciate your help and many thanks

MS Visual Web Developer is free and has very good ASP.NET back-end support and a decent front end source editor with good identification of HTML issues, underlining anything non compliant etc - however the graphical editor is next to useless. The same is true for the larger Visual Studio product.

MS Expression web is pretty good as a graphical page editor and less good as a back-end code editor.