Using the three methods of website authoring has been interesting. I have done a little hand coding in the past and had created a blog and created this blog earlier in the semester. Of the 3 probably the simplest has been this WordPress blog. Flipping through the Presentations tab is nice. Choose a theme and some widgets and you have a great blog with things properly spaced and if you don’t like the chosen theme you can just choose a different one. It makes it very easy to find one you like and go with it. Want a calender? Add it. Spending 5 or 10 minutes to choose an appealing layout is fabulous. Learning about the ability to post in the future, how to add categories and just some of the various features of WordPress was nice. It seems from the limited amount I have used it to be a very straight forward way of setting up a site. No real knowledge is necessary. Just basically a point and click. If you want to get more involved in the site it lets you customize it however you want so it can be as complicated or as simple as you want.
Dreamweaver, or any WYSIWIG application, is fascinating because it simplifies things so much when trying to create a custom web page. Blog sites are very nice for their simplicity but WYSIWIG’s offer so much more. You can very simply create a whole web page using the visual editor then go into the code view and modify things, if necessary. The ability to add tables with just a click of a button and create CSS style sheets with almost point and click simplicity is very nice. It fills the code in for you, which is fabulous. I have the worst time just typing along and forgetting letters in words or / in end tags. I have beat my head against a wall about some silly thing like a misspelled word or a forgotten closing tag and Dreamweaver seems to make that much less likely. It is also nice because it has the validator built right into it. Just a couple of clicks and the site can have a css attached to it, validated and then upload. I really like the fact you can see everything as you go.
Hand coding for me is the worst. I constantly make typos, forget code and cannot “see” what I am creating. I have no idea if it is going to look decent or horrid. The ability to see what I am doing is more comforting to me. I assume as I become more confidant in coding I won’t mind hand coding but I really prefer the way I am learning to code with a WYSIWYG.
