textpad? notepad? trying/learning to write HTML for own website, which text editor should I use?

[MyCatIsABiggerBastardThanYours]

Setting up a website and want to do it myself (not use templates provided by others). 1) because I like to learn new things 2) because cannot find a template to do what I want it to 3) because I don't want to pay someone else to amend my own web pages for me (to customise them).

I know I need to use a text editor of somesort to write the HTML but when I use notepad on Windows I don't seem to be able to save the file as .html

What am I doing wrong? Should I not use notepad? What text editor should I use and where can I get a free download for it?

(Be gentle if I've said something really stupid - complete novice here)

Anyone?

you should be able to save as .html (they are only text files anyway) but you might have to surround the name with " (double quotes) to achieve this.

notepad is quite limited though - there are lots of good editore around (some free, some relatively cheap). i am a user of ultraedit which is not free but i find great - it is worth a download to see if you would get one with a more advanced editor.

I use Wise FTP Version 5, I think it's still free, the next version up you have to pay for.

I use EditPad lite (which can handle lots of open text files, making it easy to cut and paste bits from one to another)

As far as HTML specific editors, I cannot think of any that I've used enough to keep using.

Trying to remember what I used on Windows 98 or 95, as I first got doing websites in the mid-90s...

Possibly worth a visit to Free Download A Day as there may be a freebie (also worth visiting for people with Mac and Linux OS, there is free software for everyone given a mention there)

Just found this browser/editor description.

Oh, forgot to mention, I do sometimes use Netscape v7 (there should be some archive copy on the web), as I've used Netscape since v1 was out, and bought Netscape v3 'Gold' edition in the USA in '95, as that includes 'composer' an HTML editor.

Netscape and Firefox were much stricter on HTML and some {badly coded} sites will display on MS IE but displayed nothing on Netscape (I remember one where there was no navigation menu, because of improper 'table' code ... it displayed OK on MS IE but with Netscape the most important part, to allow viewing the rest of the pages, was missing!)

I have both dream weaver and 1stpage 2000 that i am supposed to have used during a html programming course. I preferred the 1st page as i could get it to run in basic, intermediate and advanced levels depending on how much prompting i needed and what i wanted to do. It was particularly great as there was a button to push to preview the result the code brought about. Thus allowing quicker checking and correction as needed.

Thats brilliant everyone. I'll have a look at all those and see what is best. Thank you very much for responding.

Notepad can still come in handy sometimes.

When you save a Notepad document as a HTML file you need to change the 'save as type' to all files. Then when you save the document you can manually add the .html to the end of the file name. This will then save it as a html browser readable file.

If you do not already have a host for your web site, you may want to look for a host that gives free web software. Although, this is usually older version software and support may no longer be available, but it could be a cheap starting point.