Web Design

Hi Pansy, I wouldn't worry too much about what your web editor throws up, what you should concentrate on is what it looks like in a browser. I never use the design view in Dreamweaver because of this as it doesn't cope with some of the HTML/CSS I throw at it even though it's all standards compliant.

If the site in question is the one in your sig, it looks ok in Explorer 6 / 7 and Firefox, and I'm a bit shocked that your web editors are having trouble, seeing as the site is built using tables.

I think you're doing the right thing learning a bit of HTML, that way you won't have to rely on the design view in these programs. You might want to try a bit of CSS once you get comfortable with your HTML, you'll find it a big time saver for making changes on your site.

The best advice I can give you is to have a browser window open (preferably Firefox) while you edit your pages and just periodically save your webpage that you're working on, flick across to the browser and hit F5 to refresh the page to see how you're getting on.

You are seeing cross-browser differences for the html code you are viewing. FrontPage uses the IE and reads the DOM (Document Object Model) differently from Kompozer (Netscape or Mozilla?).

I am still looking for a free WYSIWYG editor as easy to use as Frontpage but with better display capabilities as you noticed.

Open the web page you are editing (from your hard-drive) in the browser you want to design for and use this as your guide while changing html.

One helpful feature is reformatting code so when you read the html the table and nested div's are easily recognizable. PSPad is good at this and has a code explorer window.

No WYSIWYG will offer complete control over display. I have never found one without its limits. Even Frontpage2000 has bugs that will drive a newbie nuts.

You can use the Firefox browser as an editor of sorts and it will teach you much along the way.

You need to install the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar (are you using Mozilla Firefox?), it adds menubar to the browser with 100+ tools you can use to examine any template, page, or site.

The Firefox Web Developer toolbar will show and teach you everything you need to know about html structure and css template coding.

Browse to it in Firefox and install.

addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

Find the new CSS>Edit CSS menu item in the toolbar/menu and click it. The sidebar that opens contains tabs for all the css files included on that page, as well as all embedded css. You can actually edit the css and see the results appear directly in the browser display of the page. It works for any page/site. When you adjust the display to your liking simply copy&paste the new css code and replace the existing css in the file with this new code.

The other one I use every day is the menu item Information>Element Information (Ctrl-Shift-F) then mouse over any element on the page. You can see the element highlighted and clicking it produces a summary/snapshot of the css style and any other attributes of that element.

IE7 has a fully featured developer toolbar as well with a different interface, I like the Firefox approach better.

Sounds like you know more than the average bear with regard to website building. Maybe what you need is for someone to fill in the blanks for you. I just published my first site with a FREE ebook giveaway after going through a FREE study with Chris Farrell online. Its great for beginners and Chris gives great email support. You'll might do well by checking him out.