The 10 Best Macintosh Web Editing Suites

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 Creative Suite suites like Web Premium or Design Premium to get graphics editing capability and other features like Flash editing as well. There are a few features that Dreamweaver CS5 lacks, some have been missing for a long time, and others (like HTML validation and photo galleries) were removed in CS5.

Version: CS5
Score: 235 / 76%

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.

Version: CS5
Score: 215 / 69%

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.

Version: CS5
Score: 215 / 69%

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).

Version: CS5
Score: 205 / 66%

Espresso is a fancy code editor for Macintosh. It offers many of the features that a good code editor has, but I couldn’t determine if it has an HTML validator built-in. It also has hooks into the CSS editor CSSedit, which can give you great CSS websites.

Version: 1.1.2
Score: 136 / 44%

At first glance RapidWeaver appears to be a WYSIWYG editor, but there is a lot to surprise you. I created a site with a large photo gallery, a blog, and two stand-alone web pages in about 15 minutes. These included images and fancy formatting. This is a great program for newcomers to web design. You get started quickly and advance to more complicated pages including PHP. It doesn't validate HTML that you hand code and I couldn't figure out how to add an external link in one of the WYSIWYG pages. There is also a large user-base with lots of plugins to get more support for advanced features including HTML 5, ecommerce, Google sitemaps, and more.

Version: 4.4.2
Score: 133 / 43%

Contribute is a WYSIWYG editor for people who have no interest or need to learning HTML. It can connect directly to a blog to give you more editing features or to an existing website to manage the pages there. Contribute works best when working with a site created using Dreamweaver templates. Contribute also provides version control and authoring information that is not included in Dreamweaver. Contribute can also edit XML files and has built-in ecommerce functions to add simple shopping carts and stores to your website.

Version: CS5
Score: 130 / 42%

Freeway Pro extends the Freeway Express web page editor. For just a little more money, you get more features like CSS support, and support for different DTDs.

There are two versions of the Freeway editor: Express and Pro

Version: 5.5
Score: 93 / 30%

What you have to remember with Jalbum is that it’s not intended to be a full-featured HTML editor. It’s an online photo album creator. You can create photo albums and host them on the Jalbum site or on your own site. I created a photo album with about 20 photos in less than 15 minutes. It's very easy to use, and perfect for the newcomer to web design who just wants to share photos with friends and family. But if you need more than that from your web editor, you should look elsewhere.

Version: 8.11
Score: 89 / 29%

Freeway Express is a great basic web page editor for the Macintosh. It includes basic graphics editing and creation so that you only need one software package to create simple websites. One drawback is that you can only save your files as HTML 4, there is no support for any other DTD.

There are two versions of the Freeway editor: Express and Pro

Version: 5.5
Score: 55 / 18%