In 2002, after graduating Senior at Cavendish Road State High School, I became very interested in website creation. I had visited many music and MIDI sites and wanted to create my own web site! My initial attempt was using Microsoft Publisher 98's web site tools but the site I created wasn't that good. Everything was out of place.
I bought a book called The Complete Idiot's Guide To Creating A Web Page Sixth Edition and started my second attempt. I tried out every single website program that came on the accompanying CD-Rom (which also had complete examples of all the exercises in the book and also some free stuff too) but only one program appealed to me... HotDog Professional 6.5.
After its trial period was over, I didn't know what to do, buy the program from Sausage Software or download another program to trial. I really loved using HotDog Pro (that is what I'll call it from now on for this post), especially its website management wizards and also a lot of other things such as an Accessibility checker that lets you know if you need to add accessibility options to different things. I even loved how you can collapse certain HTML code so you don't end up typing over it or doing something bad to something you want to keep safe. It even remembers to collapse the text when you reopen HotDog, even bookmarked text will also be remembered when you reopen HotDog as well, which is great! There are way too many things that I can tell you about HotDog Pro that I really love.
As I couldn't make up my mind on buying HotDog Pro, I went back to using Super NoteTab Light and Windows' Notepad (both are annoying as they don't color the code in HTML documents at all). Some months later, Mum told me that a friend of hers on the Internet told her that she was into web design like me and was using a program called CoffeeCup HTML Editor. Mum downloaded the latest version of CoffeeCup at that time (I think it was version 9.7) and I gave it a try until I was sure of what to do. I weighed up the pros and cons of both programs, especially their price and upgrade offers then, still unsure, I tried HotDog Pro 7.03 (the latest version of HotDog which, in some ways, is better then the one I was using). Even though I liked it a lot, I had come across this forum on the Internet that is called What Happened To Hot Dog?. After reading several of the posts on that forum, which is part of Tek-Tips (go to the Tek-Tips Home Page and do a search for What Happened To Hot Dog and it should come up), I felt very unsure about using and buying HotDog Pro and was starting to lean more towards CoffeeCup.
For years, I had been buying a magazine called Australian PC World (the Aussie version of the popular US computer mag) but when I later saw another computer magazine called Australian PC User (this one is totally Australian) featuring a free version of CoffeeCup HTML Editor 9.5 on their cover CD/DVD, I bought it and now buy PC User regularly. Mum installed the free version of CoffeeCup HTML Editor for me to use (from now on, it will just be called CoffeeCup on this blog post).
They had a trial version of CoffeeCup 2005, but I just wanted to use the free one for the time being until I decided what to do. After a while, I was fed up of using the free old version of CoffeeCup so I told Mum that I wanted to order the latest version so we went to the CoffeeCup site and ordered the HTML Editor which also offered upgrades for life!!! I would highly recommend this program as it has many features and is user-friendly.
Since I've been into web design, I've bought three more web design books to add to my collection. The reason I prefer to handle HTML coding is because you have a lot more control over it than you do with the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Internet browsers and you also know where to look for errors and fix them. Currently, I am in the middle of creating a web site to put on the Net so, one day when I get it up and running, I will post the link for it.
Well, I guess that is all I have to tell you at the moment. Bye for now ~
Brad's World - my love of music, books & modern technology.
