Websites from a business point of view are often the be all and end all, usually as like any aspect of a business this is your appearance to the world and it is on that respect, to the world due to the global nature of the internet.

As such most companies will employ a designer, coder and or project manager to complete a large corporate website. But smaller companies or individuals will often take it upon themselves to use front page (which I now believe is being merged into visual developer or with the express applications) and or other off the shelve applications.

I have before advised a number of these companies and there are numerous reasons, such as “id like to be able to edit and expand it myself” or “id like to be able to update or learn...” however their big downfall that I’m almost always consulted on is page rank, never W3C as they generally consider that secondary or unimportant when doing the “do it yourself” approach.

However there are ways around it, I myself am a big fan of empowering and teaching those who want to “do it themselves” as this is how and where most if not all of use aquired our core experience. Many CMS’s a favourite being Joomla give the user the power to edit their site almost entirely, and do add the ability to edit the meta details to effect ranking to some degree. Others however are diabolical in all aspects of web design and coding.

A number of companies, large news sites and even hosts in some cases use CMS’s because of this, as hard coding isn’t for everyone, but as far as editors go there are so many alternatives.

I personally use Dreamweaver, and a local server to test everything, keeping code and live view on separate monitors. I could use notepad but it lacks the ease of use and organisation of Dreamweaver that I like but as I said there are a number of programs and scripts that are for everyone as the master collection from adobe is on the steep side. That said codeignitor (online php library and environment) is an example of another