Since I began these pages back in 1995, many things have changed. Writing for the web has become much much easier. However, I stand by my belief that effective web editing still requires learning html, style sheets, basics of javascript, image editing, etc. The best software in the world is not going to make your pages work unless you have an understand of design, navigation, and basic code.

Full-Featured Editors

I now use Macromedia Dreamweaver for much of my work. I would recommend this to anyone as my editor of choice. A thirty day free trial is available via download.

Microsoft Frontpage comes bundled with Office 2000. Frontpage 2002 is now out. I have used Frontpage, but once I switched to Dreamweaver, I never came back.

Freeware:

Joe's Short List of HTML editors   - the list is not there anymore, but you can learn a lot from Joe's "So You Want to Make a Web Page,." site so check it out.
WebAttack Freeware Web Publishing, freeware, shareware
WYSIWYG Editor Shoot-out - from WebMonkey
WYSIWYG or the Real Thing? - you probably do need to read this article from WebMonkey
Tucows - download site for just about anything you need
Windows Editors (huge list of download sites - good place to look)

Browsers:

BrowserWars.com
Browser Watch
Netscape Download page
Tucows - download the latest software here.
Yahoo: Browsers (main page)

Open Source Templates

I just stumbled across this by accident by browsing around in a popular blogging source called Metafilter.

Open Source Web Design - some of these are really pretty nice. They download in zip format. Each design comes with a guide to explain it's features, for example if it includes a style sheet.

By the Way

These pages were originally hand coded. I now use and recommend Dreamweaver for most of the complex formatting features.

Font codes are put on with DreamWeaver© or hand coded. And now I am busy taking them all out and putting in CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) tags.  This page isn't fixed yet, by the way.

I made the little table at the top with FrontPage©, but I put in the colors manually.

 In this author's opinion, there is no substitute for knowing HTML tags and how to modify junk code put in by some of the Wysiwig editors.

For text editing I  use NotePad©  or HTML Pad© (text editors which do not mess with your hand written code).

The original versions of my pages were all hand coded.