The message FOEKIEAOKIIDEJDHCPKCIECHCDAA.rob@puricelli.freeserve.co.uk from "Roberto Puricelli" rob@puricelli.freeserve.co.uk contains these words:
Although I don't see myself abandoning Windows, I do see myself using Linux to do all the things that are too darn expensive to do on Windows, such as Web Design etc. You see, I have no programming ability whatsoever and I have yet to find a web design program that wasn't either difficult to use, severely lacking in features or didn't cost the same as the Gross National Product of a small European nation! With Open Source, it looks like I can be more creative and productive at significantly less cost than with Windows. Sadly, I have yet to discover a really good and stable music sequencing package (a la Cubase) as I am a part time musician. I have just downloaded Rosegarden 4 and will give that a go soon.
I hereby confess to being a newbie too.
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In Windows, Arachnophilia 4 is free, easy to use and, well, so are most proper HTML editors, as opposed to Frontpage, which writes as much useless guff as useful.
Linux: I haven't made any pages in Mozilla's editor yet, but the bit of twiddling I have done seems just as easy.
HTML for Dummies is, I believe, about £10. If you need it that will tell you the areas of a page and the various tags and what they do. You can get HTML document-cheching programs to seek out and show mistakes or bad coding.
It's all very simple. My advice would be to download Arachnophilia on your Windows box (www.arachnophilia.com) and download a website you like, then open it in Arach and see how it is constructed.
You don't need an expensive package, especially a WYSIWYG one which will write acres of redundant and non-standards-compliant code: all you need is a decent browser (Mozilla or Opera, or better, both, or one of the older Netscapes, and run a browser and the editor in tandem.
You can cut and paste bits into a document of your own, (and then wonder why something you had expected at the top appears somewhere else.......) and if you save the page as a file, you can open it with your browser to check it, minimise it and adjust the page in Arach, save it, maximise the browser (not forgetting to refresh) and so-on.
It really is very easy. I 'hand code' most of my pages anyway, and no-one could accuse me of being a techie. Tetchy sometimes, perhaps.