Talented people often shy away from creating a website because the prospect is just too intimidating. HTML, PSP, JavaScript and other obscure terms scare off would be web designers. Our “TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award” winner in the category of web design software takes the frustration of hard coding out of web design with a truly WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface. For users with coding experience, CoffeeCup Visual Site Designer also lets you get your hands dirty with its feature-loaded HTML editor. Whether you’ve dabbled in code or are building a site for the first time, CoffeeCup Visual Site Designer is a versatile tool ideal for creating a professional quality website on a budget.
• WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)interface
• HTML editor
• Onboard image editor
• Built-in FTP client
• Site templates and code snippets
With CoffeeCup Visual Site Designer, you can create a sleek website without poring over a thick HTML manual. CoffeCup’s visual editor is straightforward and will be immediately familiar to users that have used photo editing or desktop publishing software before.
CoffeeCup Visual Site Designer organizes pages effectively. You save files according to the pages title along with a designation that serves for organizational purposes. This makes it easy to label and keep track of various pages as you create links and cross links. By naming pages deliberately, we had no problem keeping tabs on multiple projects simultaneously.
We were impressed by CoffeeCup for including a visual design element and an HTML editor in the same program. Web Easy 7 Pro, for example, overcomplicates direct code editing. CoffeeCup allows you to see code changes in real time. For newcomers to HTML, the program serves as HTML “training wheels”—providing a chance to try new things and immediately see the result.
CoffeeCup Visual Site Designer’s allure comes largely from its intuitive visual site designer. The WYSIWYG feature provides a simple means of making great looking sites without any of the guess work involved in hard coding.
The included images and page layout options provide a solid starting point for building a website from scratch. Adding a photo to a page requires a simple click of “add image” and it can be resized and removed with a drag and drop swipe of the mouse.
CoffeeCup provides site templates with Visual Site Designer. There are a wealth of user created templates available on the net as well. We were impressed with the templates and found them to be a great reference tool as we toyed around with different site designs. While there are good templates available, CoffeeCup Visual Site Designer’s real potential is realized when you build a site from the ground up. The site creation wizard onboard CoffeeCup Visual Site Designer ensures that you avoid pitfalls in the initial phases of site design.

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