There are many tools available to help you with your web programming tasks. What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editors are particularly helpful.

High performance, high cost editors, such as Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver, can take you to web nirvana sooner than you may have thought possible. The bad news about these products is that they must be idiot-proof, and in doing so, add a lot of code you might not really want for your page. If you are not an expert with them, they can cause untold amounts of frustration. In addition, if you don't know HTML, you can not get in and repair the unwanted code.

There are a series of low cost or free products out there that do a lot for you, and leave you in command of your file. Do a web search for free HTML editor. I tested several, and chose HTML-Kit as the one that best met my needs. At present, there are two versions to choose: the free "Build 292", and the more sophisticated "HTML-Kit Tools" for a fee. Both are excellent. I use Build 292 for my own purposes, and the lessons in all my courses refer to this Build from time to time.

The lessons will assume you are using HTML-Kit. If you already use another editor, stick with it. Learn from these lessons and apply it as you can in those programs. Everything you see in these lessons will work with any HTML editor.

If you do not want to use any outside editor, or if you can not load software on your computer, you can always use a plain-text editor such as Notepad. Note: it must be a plain-text editor. Most word-processing programs (such as Microsoft Word or WordPerfect) will not work properly.