The MIT program recently hosted guest speaker J Cornelius of Coffee Cup software to discuss the company's web design tools. He serves as VP of Operations and had a wealth of information to share about their products. I have actually used a free download of Coffee Cup HTML editor for a previous JavaScript project and was not incredibly impressed. However, the download I had was not full-featured, so I've yet to see the full potential of the tool first hand.
A good HTML editor can be a beautiful, time-saving tool that can help you to stay organized as you create your web page(s). Even more appealing to me personally is an HTML editor that provides the flexibility of switching between "code" and "design" view. As an Internet Technology student, it is crucial that I can both write and comprehend the code needed to create a website. However, the more complex your web design becomes, the more tedious and time-consuming it is to experiment with changing the shade of green for your background, aligning your right navigation or the text in your footer, changing fonts, and so many other necessary/repetitive actions.
Web design software can greatly assist you with making these tweaks quickly and accurately. The greatest example I have found thus far (and I admit I haven't explored many) is Adobe Dreamweaver CS5. One of the features I love the most about Dreamweaver is its inclusion of the "pick color" tool. As opposed to searching for and guessing what hexadecimal code is the exact match for the color you desire, you can use the "pick color" tool to select that exact shade, hue, etc. Furthermore, you can switch your view between "code", "design" or "split" to view both side by side. There is an additional option to view the "live" code so that you can get a better feel for that your webpage would look like in a browser.
I nearly forgot to explain my odd title for this blog post. As we enter the 2010 holiday season, my goal this year is to be proactive in preparing for the inevitable exchanging of various gifts we've come to know as the commercialized Christmas (My focus is celebrating family and faith, but the gifts are always in the mix). With this in mind, I am already nagging family and friends for their gift lists and have taken the liberty of beginning my own relatively early. After realizing I already have everything I want/need, I finally settled on one thing I would not only love, but would greatly benefit from in my field of study... Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 of course! Anyone familiar with Adobe's products knows all too well that their software is not cheap. Instead of receiving several moderately priced gifts I won't get much use out of, I'd much rather have a single more pricey gift that will assist me in my many web design endeavors! Just a note...from past Christmas gift experience, I am almost positive this plan of mine is out of my realm of control and will fail miserably. But it's certainly worth a try :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment