by Tolga Tapcalap

Created on: July 13, 2009

I am a freelance web designer since 1996. I've used both platforms, and I have to say that since OS X mac is my choice to design web sites. We have to keep in mind that windows and internet explorer dominates the market, and whenever I design a web site I have to make sure that it shows correctly on IE more than any other browser. The strange thing is IE is the market leader, but its the worst browser when it comes to the web standards. We, web masters, have to use some tweaks to overcome the bad code handling of the IE, and I think that's a shame for microsoft.

The most important thing for a web designer is obviously the tools we use. In my opinion the best tool available to us, is the dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is available on both platforms, I've used it on both platforms as well. The verdict, according to me; it runs faster on a mac. other than that its pretty much the same. Speed may not be the most important feature of a WYSIWYG HTML editor, but it sure is a nice thing to have.

The only down side of designing a web page on a macintosh computer, is the fact that you have to make sure that your page loads correctly by IE running on windows. I remember some time ago that we have to upload the design to a server, and check for IE on another computer. However now, most of the major WYSIWYG HTML editors features tools to mimic IE running on windows, so that we can check if the page loads correctly on all platforms, and browsers. There are also stand alone applications for mac, allowing us to check the validity of a page for IE.

While discussing this topic, I have to mention a mistake that web masters working on PCs make. I think just like we make sure that the site we are designing works correctly on all platforms, they have to do the same. But most of them checks the validity across various browsers for windows, but very few of them checks validity for macs. As a mac user - and I have to say that there are many of us - when I come across a web site that does not work properly on a mac running either safari or firefox or any other browser, that site looses serious points at my perspective because of the ignorance of the designer.

To wrap it up; the best tools for the web masters are available on both platforms - and some really good ones are only available for mac - according to my user experience the said tools works better on a mac, with the exception of photoshop. The PC version currently have the 64 bit support, while macs have a support for 32 bit. But that will hopefully change in September with the launch of new OS X version, the snow leopard.

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