How these Web Pages were Created

Several tools are used to create the magic that is the JCR Design and Consulting Web site.

Most of the HTML code is lovingly hand-crafted by traditional artisans using BBEdit by Bare Bones Software, Inc. (we use the commercial version) on Apple® Macintosh® computers. BBEdit is an excellent and powerful non-WYSIWYG text processor that provides an extensive set of plug-in HTML extensions, an HTML-aware spelling checker, and incredible text-manipulation tools, including grep and multi-file search-and-replace. The freeware version, BBEdit Lite, is also very useable for HTML authoring.

We also use Macromedia's DreamWeaver, an excellent WYSIWYG dynamic HTML editor that offers seamless integration with BBEdit.

Images, navigation bars, and rollovers are prepared in Adobe® Photoshop® and ImageReady™.

To manage large collections of links like those found on the In Site Home Page, we use Claris® FileMaker Pro to automate the process. After a bit of preparation, the large list of sites in each new issue of In Site is imported into a custom FileMaker Pro database, which has scripts to automatically parse the information, generate HTML links, and assign category groupings. Our skilled craftsbeings then clean up and tweak the individual links by hand in FileMaker Pro. Non-link HTML code is painstakingly sculpted in BBEdit, and then carefully pasted into the FileMaker Pro database. Finally, the entire In Site page is completely generated on-the-fly and posted to the Web server with a single mouse-click using a custom FileMaker Pro script. The script first sorts the database by category fields, exports all the HTML code sequentially to a text file, and then sends an AppleScript to Anarchie, which causes it to FTP the text file to the Web server.

Another excellent editor which has been used to create the JCR Design and Consulting Web site in the past is HTML Web-Weaver. The shareware version was semi-WYSIWYG, and was easy to use, but some of our larger pages exceeded its 32K size limit for text files.

I tried Adobe's (né Ceneca's) PageMill, but I wasn't impressed with version 1.0--it tended to crash, was somewhat buggy, the display was not quite WYSIWYG in some instances, and the HTML code generally needed to be reworked a bit by hand. It was nice for manipulating the layout, though. I think that version 2.0 will be more ready for prime time.

I also tried Arachnid for about 30 seconds; although it was a decent editor with a lot of features, and it was free, it was also pig-dog slow, and my impatience got the better of me.

A good sampling of Mac-based HTML editors is available in Yahoo's index of Mac-based HTML authoring tools.

Back to Top

Copyright ©2000 John C. Rivard.
All Rights Reserved.
This page is subject to these Terms of Use