Can you create a great professional website using free open source software?
Absolutely. In fact, many of the best, most beautiful, and most impressive sites today are using nothing but Open Source. The languages of the web: HTML / XHTML and CSS are free and open standards (unlike, say Microsoft Word format) so you never -have- to pay for a program to produce documents in web format. You can if you want, but there’s really no need. Many professionals do use tools like DreamWeaver, but honestly there comes a point that most use it only in text mode, because it doesn’t create code as crisp and well-behaved as a skilled coder can do. If you’re going to code by hand, you might as well use a tool that’s optimized for the task. Aptana ( http://www.aptana.com ) is a coder’s editor. It understands HTML, XHTML, and CSS syntax. When you start to type a code, it automatically pops up a list of legal completions in your current language. (For example, if you’re working in CSS and you type ‘mar’ you’ll see a list of all the
