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Site Building software comes in two forms. There are online applets that allow you to create your content entirely on the web itself, and there are commercial programs that can be bought from large corporations. They range in price from entirely free to hundreds of dollars, but they all perform the same basic function. In general, how much you pay influences how many extras come with bundled with it.

Whether it is on your home computer or entirely online, site building software is excellent at creating eye-candy quickly, with a minimum of fuss. The basic interface in a WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") editor such as Frontpage or Dreamweaver is familiar to anyone who has ever used Microsoft Word, and so the learning curve is slight at most. These packages often come with dozens or hundreds of pre-made website templates which can be fitted to create a complete website in a record time with minimal editing.

Unfortunately, there are many shortcomings to this approach. Templates and editing software almost without exception give limited control over how your page will look. Beyond choosing the basic layout and colors, you are forced to use what the software wants you to. What if you like one layout but want to move the copyright information to the right? What if you want to make the menu a quarter inch thinner so you can fit a larger picture on the front page? Templates are notoriously rigid on these things, and while a user may have free reign over the content, the layout can be too unwieldy to make it worthwhile.

Another pitfall is that such programs tend to create bloated files, full of hidden meta-data and needless complexities left over by the editing process. These add extra information, and in extreme cases could actually slow down how fast your page will load.

However, in recent years with the widespread distribution of High Speed Internet connections, a few extra kilobytes rarely causes much of a delay, so optimized coding may not be so important. Writing in raw HTML can be slow and is geared toward CONTENT as opposed to STYLE. Whereas one might only need to be familiar with Microsoft Word to arrange the layout of a page in Dreamweaver, HTML and CSS take time to learn, and they require much greater attention to detail to create anything more complex than a simple page.

Therefore, the question of which to use becomes fairly simple. Site Builders can be blessings if one wants to learn as little as necessary to create a good looking page. If all you want to do is put together a simple homepage to showcase pictures of your pet, you don't need to learn an entire markup language to do it. Go online and find a simple web-based editor to create your page, and it'll be finished in minutes.

However, if you prefer to control how your website looks and behaves, or need to optimize it for viewers with disabilities or search engine bots or scripting, HTML may be a much better choice for you.

Learn more about this author, Kristopher Chambers.
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