Best Website Software

Website designer software lets you build from the ground up

Dreamweaver, developed by Macromedia and now owned by Adobe, still earns more recommendations than any other full-featured website designer software suite -- though it gets mixed reviews for ease of use. Despite being still in its beta release (meaning it's still in formal testing), reviews especially praise the newest version, Adobe Dreamweaver CS4, for incorporating more upgrades than Dreamweaver CS3 (*Est. $400, upgrade $200). Dreamweaver CS4 beta is available as a trial upgrade to existing Dreamweaver owners, but only for a two-day trial to new users. (The full public release is scheduled for late 2008.)

Dreamweaver remains the clear best website software for Mac users. For PC users, though, its supremacy is getting a real challenge from Microsoft Microsoft Expression Web 2 (*Est. $300, $100 upgrade for previous owners). The first version of Expression Web earned praise as easier for novices to learn to use, compared with Dreamweaver -- but also for superior use of CSS. Experts say that the latest version (Expression Web 2) is even better; it costs less, is simpler to use, and does everything you might want to do on a site. Like Dreamweaver, Expression Web 2 now integrates with Flash and with Photoshop -- the professional's choice for photo editing. (You can also use much less expensive photo-editing software.)

Expression Web is an especially good choice for anyone used to using Microsoft Office, because it's now much easier to import Word and Excel files. An excellent comparison review by David Rodriguez at WPFD: Web Page Design for Designers -- testing Dreamweaver and Expression Web by using them to recreate the same site -- finds Expression Web much easier to use.

PC Magazine ranks even the first version of Expression Web as an Editors' Choice for the best website software. The main reason to start with Dreamweaver is to be able to use PHP on any server, not just a server that features Microsoft ASP.NET. For most PC users new to web design, this is quite an esoteric reason -- and Expression Web makes it easier to actually use PHP.

Both Dreamweaver and Expression Web are "What You See Is What You Get" -- or WYSIWYG -- website design programs designed to be a user-friendly way to create the complex code required for a sophisticated web page. Dreamweaver initially centered on creating web pages using HTML (hypertext markup language) code, then gradually incorporated the newer CSS technology as browsers became capable of understanding and displaying it. Microsoft took a different path. Its earlier website designer software, FrontPage, continued to be strictly an HTML editor. Instead of upgrading that program, the company elected to make an entirely fresh start with Expression Web, centering it on CSS and making it easier to use. However, reviews say this fresh start can be a jolt to users upgrading to Expression Web from FrontPage.

Lots of less expensive WYSIWYG web design software is available for under $100. The main drawback is that the most current CSS capabilities are apt to be incorporated as afterthoughts rather than designed in from the start as in Microsoft Expression Web. A website can look elegant and work well without relying on CSS, however, and some inexpensive programs are easy to learn to use.

CoffeeCup Visual Site Designer (*est. $50) costs less than most. The CoffeeCup HTML Editor (*est. $50) has earned top ranking in reviews of WYSIWYG web design software over the years, and the company's Visual Site Designer is even easier to use. The comparison review at Smart Computing recommends its interface as "far and away the simplest and most intuitive we tested." The excellent review by David Rodriguez at WPFD: Web Page Design for Designers agrees, ranking it at the top alongside Microsoft Expression Web. It's much easier to use than either Dreamweaver or FrontPage 2003 (which is discontinued but still available). Visual Site Designer provides lots of templates and JavaScript add-ins, makes it easy to incorporate video and even includes the ability to make and play Flash files on your website.

For Mac users, Macworld editors recommend RapidWeaver 4.0 (*est. $80) over Apple iWeb '08 for users who find Dreamweaver intimidating or overkill. As noted earlier, Apple iWeb also requires an annual subscription to Apple .Mac service (*est. $100 per year). Reviewing RapidWeaver for Macworld, Tim Haddock says "Within an hour of installing the software, I posted a pretty darn handsome personal Web site, complete with a photo album and a podcast I had that needed a good home, plus file sharing, a video gallery, an RSS feed, a feedback form, and the beginnings of a blog." That's pretty hard to beat -- and it also integrates with iPhoto.

Free sometimes trumps paid web designer software, and reviews do identify some good free software. The main drawback is that except for the blog software discussed earlier, free site software programs are usually HTML editors that require learning more coding skills. On the other hand, the best HTML editors make this relatively easy -- and it's a valuable skill to learn.

At Merificam Press, a site aimed at professional web designers, reviewer Matthew Griffin compares five free web design tools, giving first ranking to Evrsoft First Page 2006. It's hard to use PHP with it, but otherwise it's convenient, with a nice WYSIWYG window so you can see the results of the code as you edit it. Griffin says "It has everything you would expect to see in a professional editor like Dreamweaver, including quick browser preview, rollover images, special character list, spell check and thesaurus lookup, visual color picker, and a stylesheet link-up wizard." The main drawback is that it's just a plain HTML editor, so it's not for setting up complex or elegant layouts. First Page 2006 is only for Windows.

For Mac users, Griffin recommends KompoZer, a better version of the popular Nvu 1 software. She calls it a "bare-bones HTML editor" but notes that it makes using CSS convenient. The About.com web design guide, Jennifer Kyrnin, also recommends KompoZer in her brief review of ten free web design programs for Macs.