For most professional developers, there is no better web design software than Dreamweaver.  But Dreamweaver is expensive, and most people getting started in web development won’t want to spend $399 US on web design software.  I think the best choice for someone looking for inexpensive web design software is the Coffee Cup HTML Editor.  For $49.00 US, the Coffee Cup HTML Editor is packed with features, and it should be relatively easy for use by beginners.  It has both a visual (WYSIWYG) editor, an (X)HTML code editor, and a CSS editor.  It includes many features found in Dreamweaver, such as project/site management and a find and replace tool that provides options to make changes to a single file, all open files, or all files in a specified folder.  To help users get started, the program comes with ten themes, and additional themes are relatively inexpensive.  All the themes I looked at use CSS layouts and valid (X)HTML code.  For more information, visit the Coffee Cup HTML Editor website.

After hearing success stories from other developers about how they used content management systems (CMS) such as Drupal and Joomla to develop sites for clients, I evaluated both programs.  I also learned that WordPress, which I have used for blogs, is also a good general purpose CMS.  However, after working with all three programs, and converting both my personal and business sites to static WordPress sites (I have since re-coded both sites), I came to the conclusion that I have greater flexibility and can more quickly develop sites that are stable and standards-compliant if I do my own coding.  I will continue to use WordPress for blogs. In those cases where a client wants to be able to add, edit, and delete site content,  I will use SnippetMaster.