Web pages are written in Hyper Text Mark-up Language (HTML) and writing this code has been the way to write web pages since the beginning of the internet stone age (it began around about 1990!).
However, it wasn't long before a visual way to do the same thing called 'What You See Is What You Get' or WYSISYG (say 'Wisiwig') came along with its fancy looks and smart features and tried to take over. But which of these two ways is really better for getting the job done?
HTML
It's recently been overhauled, livened up and dragged into the current century with the adoption of XHTML. If you don't know how to code websites then learn this standard - it's the future of website coding.
The code is not hard to learn, in fact it used to be said that you could learn enough code to produce a respectable looking website on a wet Sunday afternoon and that is still more or less true.
Like anything, however, you need to sit down and work through the initial stages so that you understand it but it's not hard and very quickly you'll find you can produce good looking pages.
So, where do you go to learn it? There are lots of books that will teach you but free tutorials are out there on the internet, too. Try w3schools.com for half an hour a day for a few days and by the end of the week I bet you'll be writing pretty fair looking code!
But remember what I said at the beginning about the new standard. You want to make sure you learn XHTML with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
WYSIWYG
Like everything in life, if you want it easy you have to pay for it and web coding is no different. WYSIWYG editors let you design a web page the way you design a printed document - they're DTP for the online world!
Basically, you add components to the page and slide them into the best position to produce the page design that you want. All the time, behind the scenes, the program is working away furiously to write the HTML code to keep up with you so that when you look at the page in a browser it appears fully formed. It's a great and very visual way to design pages.
To do this, however, a lot has to go on under the hood and all this functionality has to be programmed into a complex piece of software that needs a lot of preparing and testing before it can be released.
As you would expect, this complexity comes at a price and WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver by Adobe are not cheap. That said, editors like this are excellent software to use allowing you to concentrate on the look you want to achieve without having to worry about the code. It's a bit like building a wall with large pre-fabricated blocks instead of bricks.
A Bit of Both
The makers of WYSIWYG software point out that you wouldn't produce a printed magazine by writing the code for your printer (although you could) so WYSIWYG is the way to go.
But some WYSIWYG editors have been criticised for producing horrendously complex code that made pages run and load slowly and which were hard or next to impossible to modify by hand. Also, the modern trend in website design is for a clean, minimalistic Web2.0 style that is best made with hand coding that mixes XHTML with other web scripting languages like Javascript (equally easy to learn) and Cascading Style Sheets.
For this reason the best approach is to learn to use both and use WYSISWG to prepare or 'rough out' pages until you get the design you want and then use hand coding to do the final version.
If cost is a factor then look for free WYSIWYG editors like Composer (available at no cost with the excellent SeaMonkey suite of programs) or the inexpensive CoffeeCup Editor.
For hand coding you can get a range of very acceptable and free editors and a list and review of each can be found on Wikipedia if you search for 'html text editors'.
So my advice, if you are preparing to write your own website, is to learn to use both ways of producing pages. It does mean a little more work but the result will far outweigh the work involved.
