Macintosh Web Editors for Professional Web Designers

Dreamweaver is one of the most popular professional Web development software packages available. It offers power and flexibility to create pages that meet your needs. I use it for everything from JSP, XHTML, PHP, and XML development. It is a good choice for professional Web designers and developers, but if you're working as a solitary freelancer, you might want to look at one of the CS suites like Web or Design to get graphics editing capability as well.

Creative Suite Web Standard is the minimum a freelancing Web designer needs to build and maintain Web sites. It comes with Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, and Contribute. These give you graphics editing, HTML editing, and Flash as well as Contribute to provide your customers with support. It also comes with Bridge to manage your images and Device Central to work with mobile devices. If you don't anticipate needing a lot of graphics manipulation, this is the perfect suite for a freelancer. It also offers a lot of features that a member of a Web design team can appreciate like check-in check-out, templates, and integrated version control.

If you are a graphic artist and then a Web designer you should consider Creative Suite Design Premium. Unlike Design Standard which doesn't include Dreamweaver, Design Premium gives you InDesign, Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, SoundBooth, and Acrobat. Because it includes Dreamweaver it includes all the power you need to build Web pages. But Web designers who focus more on graphics and less on the purely HTML aspects of the job will appreciate this suite for the extra graphic features included in it.

Creative Suite Web Premium is the best suite for Web designers who do it all on the Web - such as 1-person freelance shops. It offers a great combination of graphics programs (Photoshop extended, Fireworks, and Illustrator), Web programs (Dreamweaver and Contribute), multimedia applications (Flash and SoundBooth) and additional support programs (Acrobat, Bridge, and Device Central). This is the suite that I prefer of the CS suites as it provides me with all the tools I need without a lot of extra features.

Creative Suite Master Collection is the ultimate in creativity suites, and the price reflects that. It includes all of the Adobe design products including Dreamweaver, Photoshop extended, Illustrator, Flash, InDesign, Acrobat, Contribute. Plus all the production products like AfterEffects, Premiere, SoundBooth, and Encore. If you plan to do video editing along with your Web design, you might want to look at this suite to get them all bundled together. But it might be less expensive to buy only the exact products you need. You should do an evaluation of what your needs are, unless the price of the Master Collection doesn't daunt you (or your purchasing department).

KompoZer is a good WYSIWYG editor. It is based on the popular Nvu editor - only it is called an "unofficial bug-fix release." KompoZer was conceived by some people who really liked Nvu, but were fed up with the slow release schedules and poor support. So they took it over and released a less buggy version of the software. Ironically, there hasn't been a new release of KompoZer in over a year.

Nvu is a good WYSIWYG editor. I prefer text editors to WYSIWYG editors, but if you don't, then Nvu is a great choice, especially considering that it's free. I love that it has a site manager to allow you to review the sites that you're building. It's surprising that this software is free. Feature highlights: XML support, advanced CSS support, full site management, built-in validator, and international support as well as WYSIWYG and color coded XHTML editing.

Good Page offers a lot of the features of a great text editor while also providing some WYSIWYG support. I like the structure views of the document - this makes it easier to see the DOM for JavaScript development. Another cool thing is the CSS editor, which includes the specificity right on the property. If you've ever fought with a very complex style sheet you'll recognize the value of that.

Amaya is the W3C Web editor. It also acts as a Web browser. It validates the HTML as you build your page, and since you can see the tree structure of your Web documents, it can be very useful for learning to understand the DOM and how your documents look in the document tree. It has a lot of features that most Web designers won't ever use, but if you're worried about standards and you want to be 100% sure that your pages work with the W3C standards, this is a great editor to use.

Style Master takes a different approach to Web page design. Instead of focusing on the HTML, it focuses on the CSS - so that you can work on the design of your sites in an intuitive way. I've found that many Web sites have much more complicated CSS than HTML code, so this is a great program to use to untangle the mess.