Hand Coding, Editor, or Outsource
A few weeks ago, a brilliant idea for a website hit you out of the blue. Since then, you’ve spent countless hours determining your site’s layout, content, and functionality. Now that the planning is complete, it’s time to see your creation come to life. But how is it going to be built, and who will do the building?
If you have some know-how of HTML and web scripting languages, this might not be a big question. After all, the person who conceived and designed the website already has an idea of how everything should fit together. However, even if this is the case, there is still the question of how you should go about building it.
One option is to hand code the entire site from scratch. Break out your text editor and just start going at it. This is perhaps the most adaptable way of doing things. When you’ve got your hands on the source code, you can control the minutia of the site to your heart’s content. However, it also tends to be the most time-consuming, since every bit of code has to be written by hand.
The other option is to use some form of HTML editor, such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver. This has the advantage of expediency at the price of precision. You’ll come out of the process with automatically generated code that approximates your original design but may not mimic it perfectly. If precision isn’t an issue, then this is the option for you.
Most web authors will find a happy medium between the two approaches. For example, a webmaster might code the more mission-critical portions of a website by hand while leaving the overall coding to HTML editors. Tables, for example, are relatively simple for an editor to produce, but may take some time to code by hand. This balanced approach allows webmasters to be precise and productive at the same time.
On the other hand, if you know very little about web design or development, building your website can become a nightmare of a task. For those without the skills to do the job themselves, a professional web design service is the method of choice, although the cost of development can be fairly steep for all but the simplest of websites.
Whatever approach you decide to take, be it hand-coding, editor, or outsource, take care that the quality of the final product lives up to your vision. Does the end result excite you as much as the initial concept? If not, it may be time to reevaluate your development process.