2 web development tools I wish was alive and well

People make web development so difficult these days. Web frameworks made it even worse; these things made you believe that you could create a dynamic and fully functional website in minutes. In reality, you will still need some basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, graphics design, and web user interface, before you can go forward and learn these frameworks.

Let me exclude site builders like Wix, Weebly, and SquareSpace because those are just templating and it's just... sad. I'm talking an almost complete site where you could then manually and granularly modify and plug to your heart's content.

WordPress made things a little bit easier, with its 3-step setup. Then you either work with the templates and plugins or choose to build one from scratch. But please stay away from those complicated CMS-looking templates, especially the purchased ones, and especially if you think you want to bootstrap by customising them yourself. You must understand that even if you can do it, you will be sacrificing a heck of a lot of your time and effort to customise it, when it's best for you to focus on making money elsewhere.

I've taught non-technical people how to build a website from scratch before, only because specifically during those time periods, two tools emerged. Once these two tools were phased out, so did my website training.
Seriously, they were so good, that they built those sites from the ground up and had their websites running within a day or two, database driven and all. One of the tools was built near the start of the millenium, while the other was a brainchild of Google.

#1 Microsoft FrontPage

Hah! You must've thought I used Macromedia/Adobe Dreamweaver during the early pre-2000 days of web dev. After trying it out and looking at the back-end codes that Dreamweaver generated, no way was I touching it!

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FrontPage, especially the 2000 version, comes with the cleanest generated HTML codes a WYSIWYG (pronounced why-see-wig) editor could ever create. You could drag and drop web elements, then go into the HTML and code some changes, and the re-generated pages won't even touch my modified codes.

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One of my favourite parts of FrontPage is the Navigation function. I can create a visual layout of the site content before I start to code. That way, FrontPage can generate the sitemap, navigation buttons and menus dynamically, while I focus on content.

FrontPage doesn't exist anymore. There's now Expression Web, which I've never used before, and I'm quite content with Microsoft's Visual Studio Code. I plan to give Expression Web a try once I have the time.

#2 Chrome Dev Editor

Seriously this was the bomb! This 2013 editor, which I lovingly call CDE, had great integration with Bower and GitHub. Easily installable via Chrome extensions. Runs offline. But my absolute favourite was the Polymer Designer.

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This tool was what got me started with Polymer and Material Design. The stuff everyone can build were mobile-friendly. We can drag and drop elements. The apps and sites were gorgeous. They were amazing.

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Then, Google decided to kill it. My mobile web dev life has never been the same since. I don't know if I could ever forgive Google for this. It felt worse than when Google killed Google Reader.

I've yet to see a decent replacement for Chrome Dev Editor. If I had the patience to look into Dart, I think I would have done something with the Github fork and improve on it. Too bad it wasn't my priority.
Maybe one day I'll do something about CDE.

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