By Thomas ap Dewi

Well bugger me sideways (actually please dont). For years and years and through the many incarnations of Seaside News, I've been creating the pages myself by using MS notepad to edit them.
It's relatively easy and I've been checking the code is OK by bunging the page into a browser to make sure everything loads as it should and hitting F5 after each small change. I confess that I have, in the past, poured scorn on those who use WYSIWYG editors to build websites, utterly ignored stylesheets, and laughed in the face of huge pages of code.

However, two recent developments have changed my view on the way sites should be made. The first is this fantastic template from Demus Design, which apparently does use CSS and holy fuck, it looks good. The second is that with using templates, it becomes neccesary to trawl through other people's HTML, which in notepad, is a pain in the arse.

So, after spending about two days in notepad, getting the site up and running and ironing out niggles, I finally gave in and decided that this was too much like hard work for what is supposed to be an slightly entertaining hobby. I am now armed with a *ahem* "extended trial version" of Dreamweaver, and goodness me, it has made my life easier. Want a box? Bam! It's there! Fed up with sticking paragraph tags, line breaks and other fiddly, but incredibly neccesary formating features throught the story? Bam! It does them for you! Want to see what effect your changes are having in realtime? Boom! Just glance at the lower half of the screen!

I am converted.