In my quest for one of the better freeware HTML editors, I reviewed BlueGriffon, Trellian Webpage and Alleycode html editors. BlueGriffon is a free WYSIWYG html editor that has alot of features and addons that can be very beneficial to a web developer. The interface is also intuitive and basic in the sense that it reminds one of a word processor. It does the job though with the ability to quickly change between  the code view and WYSIWYG view. One drawback is the lack of documentation which can be a problem especially for new web designers that need more hand holding than those a bit more experienced. The pros of this web editor are the free fire ftp addon to publish your site quickly to a hosting company, also the CSS Pro editor that allows web authors full control over their style sheets. In summary, BlueGriffon is great for educational purposes that allow design students to get a  handle of some of the basic principles of web development.

The next review on the list is Trellian Webpage. At first I was impressed with the impressive list of features such as the ability to build search engine friendly websites, meta tag editor, an intuitive interface and more. What I found was more of a mass of files downloading to my computer, apps and other things that I was not so sure about. After reading through some of the fine print, I discovered that some of the tools were not free after all. In addition, I was not impressed with the interface..as it felt like more of a simple ms word processor than a true html editor. I ended up deleting all of the files off of my computer hard drive and moved on to my next review.

Alleycode has a very sleek interface and feels fast and light. It has a built in search engine optimizer, live preview and color picker. One nice thing about alleycode is that it comes with a comprehensive tutorial for web developers. The downsides are there is not much extensibility to the product and official support came to an end in 2010.

After using dreamweaver for the past year, I can say that it is hard to go back and use freeware html editors..of course this is just personal preference and what I have got use to.