New Twist ala A Perfect Web Site Solution

Hello =)

With a new twist, I'd like to refocus the goal of this discussion to 
answering the following questions:  How can I create great and compatible 
sites as quickly as possible?  Most importantly, how can I make money doing 
it?   In other words, what high-end solutions are people using to create 
high-end sites?

I've been doing personal sites for a while and my proudest achievement is 
AtFantasy.com (sci-fi / fantasy adventure site).  Excluding snip-its of 
code I've grabbed from places on the net, everything on my site has been 
hand coded.  It's all fun and games until some stupid browser 
incompatibility shows up.  Then I go bonkers, drink lots of Mt. Dew, and 
spend hours trying to figure out why something that obviously *should* work 
doesn't.

Now that I'm unemployed and looking for work (please hire me!), I'd 
absolutely love to get into web development.  I've been trying to find ways 
of working from home and bringing in at least $1600 per month.  Roughly one 
third of what I'm used to getting paid in network administration and 
certainly far from the levels of what Sathish is talking about, but 
happiness is happiness.

Other than being a blatant promo, why do I mention all of this?  All of 
these issues have brought me to a certain frame of mind.  I'm trying to 
find ways of making money through AtFantasy.com and through developing 
sites for others.  I believe these are issues every professional web 
developer faces and I'm curious to see what you've done.

The first goal was rapid development.  Finding ways to generate high 
quality pages as quickly as possible.  I figured going with an editor of 
some sort would help, but I didn't like Frontpage, Dreamweaver, or Go Live, 
because they have a habit of leaving extra and unnecessary code or they 
format the code in a way that makes it take longer to go in later and make 
changes.

After going through all of the editors I could find, I ended up sticking 
mainly to using Homesite as a text editor, because it highlights 
keywords.  Sometimes I'll use Go Live, but I always transfer the code to 
Homesite and clean it up.  I also had a great program to convert MS Word 
documents, but I can't find it :(  It was perfect, because it would take 
HTML generated in word and remove all of the extra crud.  If you happen to 
know what it is, please let me know.

Also, have any of you had much luck in using the editors out there?  I 
always hear rumors that people have a lot of luck with things like 
Dreamweaver, but the pros I ask usually hand code everything.

Another thing I've been doing is creating templates and collecting my own 
web development library.  I think this is probably helping me the most in 
being able to create new web pages quickly.  All I have to do is find 
something I've already done that's similar and alter it.

Finally, I've created PHP scripts that work with the MySQL database to 
store web pages.  It allows me to create a bunch of templates that are 
dynamic, based on the content of the page being viewed.  A lot of pages are 
even auto generated for me.  For example, I can submit a bunch of pages and 
the system automatically creates a summary page of what's available.  Very 
handy.

Of course, I'm sure many of you advanced web developers are so familiar 
with this kind of stuff that it's boring ;)  What tools and approaches do 
you use to create quality web pages really quickly?

What about matching rapid development with standards compliancy?  I didn't 
discover the validators until recently.  I think they hate my 
site.  Everything seems ok when I surf the site using different browsers, 
but I can't help wondering.  Are people having problems they aren't telling 
me about?  Would my web pages somehow be better if I focused on compliance?

So far, I've tended towards ignoring the compliancy issue as long as the 
web pages look ok when I test them through different browsers.  Actually, 
I've had to ignore that part, because I've lacked the time necessary for 
running through to cross every T and dot every I.  I know many of you 
verify browser compatibility by testing the same way I do.  Now I'm trying 
to find out... are there certain approaches or tools you use to help ensure 
things will be as compatible as possible?  For example, have you sworn off 
the use of a certain editor or certain html tags?  Have you found the Holy 
Grail of web development that gives you an environment where you can follow 
a series of steps and feel confident that things will get developed in the 
quickest amount of time and be the most standards compatible?

I don't mind if you outline a 15 step process that starts with "write your 
document in word" and then transfer it over to such and such 
program.  Maybe you have an arcane formula we'd all benefit from hearing, 
so spill the beans! hehe

I look forward to hearing your responses.

-Ed

ps.... sorry for the long winded letter.  I like to talk *grin*

pps....  As an example of standards compliance, I have a few web pages that 
behave oddly and I often wonder if it's because I didn't meet some 
standard.  I suspect it's because I'm using style sheets.  If you had ideas 
on this, here's an example page:  http://www.atfantasy.com/dnd/faq   After 
the page is loaded, try paging up and down.  It's really slow in IE, but 
fast in Netscape.  I have no idea why.  Do you?

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