How to make web pages for free

Although it might be easier to make web pages using $400 proprietary software (I am unconvinced), ratings of the most popular options on VersionTracker tend to be quite poor. I decided to save my money and to see what I could do for free, learning a small amount of HTML code (even this was optional and something I avoided for several years.) It turns out you can make respectable web pages using freely available software. It isn't flawless, but it turns out to work fine for my needs. Here is what I suggest:

WYSIWYG HTML editors

The family of Mozilla browsers, which includes Netscape, Firefox, Mozilla, Camino, SeaMonkey, and so on, are closely related and are available for free. Many of these include a "Composer" or editor function (Firefox has this on PC but not Mac) that opens a web page in editing mode. The display is WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) and usually works quite well. You can format text, make tables, insert images, and so forth, in much the same way that you do in word processing programs. You don't have to type a single stroke of HTML code to make perfectly respectable web pages.

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HTML source code editors

At some point it might be useful to manually edit your HTML source code. To fix minor problems, any unix text editor, such as vim (which has HTML syntax highligting), will probably be faster than a WYSIWYG editor, but you will have to learn a bit of HTML markup language. Most of it is transparent, so you can learn just by examining existing HTML documents, and all of it is documented on numerous web sites. Here are my favorite options:

SubEthaEdit (an OS X application)

Instant HTML: SubEthaEdit was the first editor to implement a live updated webpage preview powered by Safari's WebKit engine. This feature provides an instant WYSIWYG preview window while you compose HTML code, as shown in this screenshot (click to enlarge):

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SubEthaEdit is no longer free for non-commercial users, but older versions that are free to download are still available.

Vim

The best unix text editor ever invented is also a great html editor, and gives the option of syntax highlighting.

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Clean up your code with tidy

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FTP

More advanced stuff

Now here is some normal default body text with a rollover link.

here is some code