Obtaining and using Homesite

Homesite is a text-based HTML editor. You will type the text and select the HTML tags from tool bars to format your text. You can see here a picture of the Homesite screen, when I was writing this tutorial.

You can obtain Homesite for free (version 1.2) or buying a registered copy. The main differences between the two versions besides price are:

In the free version you can only edit one page at a time. You have to close one page to work with another. But of course you can open many instances (copies) of Homesite as needed, allowing you to work in different pages at the same time.
In the registered version you can open many pages at the same time. This is very important for copying text from one page to another, to develop a page with a series of links to other pages that you are also creating or editing.
The free version will not be updated, lacking support to many new tags created by Mozilla and Microsoft.
The registered copy is maintained regularly, offers end-user support, etc. You can download the registered version for a 30 day free trial.

My recommendation is that if you use Homesite infrequently and develop your pages using another software, probably a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, such as MS Office , WordPerfect, Nvu, you should get the free version only. If you use Homesite as your basic HTML editor, then the registered version is better for you, or yet Dreamweaver that includes both a graphical environment and Homesite.

Using Homesite

As I said in the introduction, Homesite is a text-based HTML Editor. You type the page content and format for the content by applying tags available in a variety of tool bars provided by Homesite -- QuickTab (basic tags), Fonts, Tables, Frames, Forms, Lists, Tags (all), Styles, JavaScript, etc. You highlight the word, sentence, etc, and then click on the toolbar to place the tag around what you selected. You do need need to know the HTML tag, Homesite will know the corresponding tag and apply it to the text. You can even create your own custom tool bar.

You can also spell-check, verify links, obtain HTML help, preview your page in a browser, obtain the document weight(gives you the file size and estimated download time) validate HTML, etc. Many tags can be changed by right-clicking and choosing new values. Images (gif, jpg, etc files) that you have locally can be inserted in your page by dragging and dropping (Homesite creates the tags for you). Links to local files are done in the same way (drag and drop).

Adobe has created a very good User Manual, including tutorials to create pages, manage projects, etc, but you would have to download the trial version of Homesite to read it. The free version of HomeSite does not have a manual , but use Help to learn more about it.

The first time you select the symbol to show the page you created in an external browser located under Options, as shown in the left, a dialog will prompt you for the name(s) and location(s) of the external browser(s). You should have at least Firefox and Internet Explorer as external browsers so that you can see how your page will look in each one of them. Again, if you are not a professional developer use it to fix tag problems and create pages you can only do so in text (source) mode. You can also use Nvu to do similar work in source code, but many times Homesite is easier to work on plain source code.

This page is maintained by Al Bento who can be reached at abento@ubalt.edu. This page was last updated on February 24, 2009. Although we will attempt to keep this information accurate, we can not guarantee the accuracy of the information provided.