Re: Hand-coding all the way, or...?

Hi Maya,

I'm certainly no expert but I can give you a novice opinion. I've 
been studying HTML for the last 4 years--have never been able to 
afford a WYSIWYG--not even shareware, so I have been doing all my 
code by hand.

About a year ago I had a temporary job where I had to learn Front 
Page--talk about a headache!! From that experience I quit doing 
temporary work and got my own business license and set up my own web 
design business at home where I can do coding (by hand) on my own 
time and at my own speed and pick and choose my clients.

You are right that at times it takes a long time to code things by 
hand but I think that not having to figure out the complexities of a 
WYSIWYG editor  when things get messed up makes up for it. Because I 
have coded everything myself and I know what codes were changed I 
usually only have to run my code through a validator to find the 
problem and I can fix it quickly. Whereas with FP or other editors 
you practically need to be a programmer  (or like to chat on 
hwg-basics) to figure out the problem.

I made the mistake of adding data to some of my pages that should 
have been in the footer.txt (ssi) recently and really paid for it 
because I had to go in and change about 50 pages. Live and learn! You 
only make those kinds of mistakes once.

I haven't tried databasing but I can see that I'm going to be sorry I 
didn't very soon, so that is my next learning project.

I hope this helps.

Lori

>Martin, I'm sure you're right.  I learned HTML but then switched to a
>WYSIWYG.  It's terrific for design purposes, but it is hard to go in and
>tinker with the code--my program simply won't allow it, and it also messes
>up code that I write separately and try to "import."  I am reverting to
>hand-coding (via HomeSite) but I am wondering...for purposes of speed, don't
>all you hand-coders suffer?  And what if you need to go back into hundreds
>of pages and replace something?  Do any of you switch between a WYSIWYG and
>hand-coding?  I'm a designer/copywriter, not a code guru, so doing all the
>HTML by myself is really not a lot of fun for me!  What about databasing?
>Will I be stuck writing everything myself?  Aaaack!  I really don't know any
>of the scripting languages well, just enough so I can "tinker."
>
>Cheers, Maya

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