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Anyone with a text editor, a good grasp of, and enough time on their hands can create a beautiful website. But what if you don't have time to brush up on your coding skills?

What if squinting at a page full of code makes your head hurt? Or what if you're, you know, lazy? A bumper crop of Mac apps has sprung up to help people in just such a predicament, applying a friendly front end and familiar tools to the ever-more-complicated word of web coding. While none of the three polished apps we review here will be perfect for everyone, chances are that one of them has the right feature set to fit your needs. TurboWeb.

Unique among this lineup, TurboWeb boasts a huge, searchable library of royalty-free stock photos — a big help for zero-budget designers who want to spice up an otherwise text-heavy site. I also enjoyed TurboWeb's instant access to my personal Pictures folder and iPhoto or Photos library. That said, you can't search through those libraries from within TurboWeb, so if you've got a pile of pictures on your hard drive, be prepared to do a lot of scrolling until you find the one you want. I also found it odd that I couldn't use any of the program's stock photos in its photo-carousel widget. On the whole, TurboWeb does most of what you'd want it to perfectly adequately, including a bare-bones but functional way to upload your site to the FTP server of your choice (or sign up for TurboWeb's own recommended hosting provider).

The online help files are simple but sufficient as well. Nonetheless, TurboWeb fell short in a few key areas. I couldn't get text to wrap around an image for the life of me.

I couldn't create a button with different active, hover, or default states. TurboWeb's short list of font options can't be changed or expanded. Responsive design support — allowing you to display the same pages differently on devices with different-sized screens — was rudimentary at best; you can swap between desktop and tablet versions, but if you've finished creating one layout, you'll have to start all over from a blank page to create the other. And TurboWeb's ability to edit and apply custom classes is rudimentary at best.

Web Developer Software For Mac

It applies only to text — not images, buttons, or anything else — and offers no control over margins or padding. $19.99 - EverWeb. Like TurboWeb, EverWeb offers a similar drag-and-drop interface (albeit without the handy grid or guides) and overall feature set, with the same limitations when it comes to customizing CSS style elements on your pages. And it shares TurboWeb's somewhat clunky approach to 'responsive design,' requiring you to create a whole separate set of mobile counterpart pages to those on your desktop site.

It lacks TurboWeb's sizable stock image library, but makes up for it by automatically supporting any of Google's extensive library of free fonts, once you've downloaded and installed them on your Mac. So why should you even consider shelling out $60 more than TurboWeb for EverWeb? First, EverWeb boasts outstanding help files, including an extensive and well-written manual running more than 100 pages, along with available right from the app's opening screen. Second, EverWeb's publishing tools are somewhat more robust, with more options for FTP server info, and the ability to add custom header/footer code and even a favicon for your site. And finally — and perhaps most importantly, if you need it — EverWeb builds in the ability to set up a basic online store, including buy buttons and a shopping cart, using PayPal. Few other web design apps offer anything like this — neither TurboWeb nor Blocs do — and those that do often charge extra for the privilege. With the few exceptions I've noted, like TurboWeb's searchable stock photo database, EverWeb does basically everything that TurboWeb does, but just a little bit better.

However, unless you want to set up your own online store quickly, easily, and inexpensively, EverWeb may not be better enough to merit paying four times TurboWeb's price. Free, $79.99 after trial - Blocs. Packed with powerful but friendly features, and getting better all the time, Blocs is the app I wish I'd had back when I built sites for a living. Rather than making you build a site from scratch, Blocs offers prebuilt page elements that you can quickly stack atop each other. Once you've roughed out the overall look of your page, it's easy to customize its content and fine-tune its appearance.

Switching into 'drop mode' brings up a searchable palette of individual elements — buttons, headers, etc. — that you can place within the prebuilt frameworks to further tweak them to your liking. Blocs boasts powerful control over CSS styles, including the ability to create custom classes and apply them to any element in your site. Tweak the custom class once — change the color from maroon to gold, for instance — and the change ripples through every element with that class, site-wide. And Blocs offers pinpoint precision over nearly every CSS style parameter you can think of, all in a clean, coherent interface. Blocs' support for responsive design also leaves competitors eating its dust. Design a page for the desktop, and with one click you can see what it'll look like on tablets or phones, too.

Page Maker Software For Mac

You can change elements of the design to improve its readability in one view without affecting how it'll look in the others. And you can even change or create custom classes specifically for phone or tablet pages as well. It's only fair to note that the sized-down versions of these pages don't always render on the actual devices exactly as they look in Blocs, but they tend to be close enough to fix with a little extra tweaking. Blocs also supports a few fancy bells and whistles such as video backgrounds.

Adding Google web fonts to Blocs' menu is as easy as pasting in the right URL. And it's the only program in this lineup to include support for several popular free or paid content management systems, including October and Pulse.

Blocs's excellent help files and video tutorials can show you how to quickly set up a Blocs page as a front end for database-driven content in these systems, among many other useful tips and tricks. Blocs isn't perfect. It's the work of a single programmer, so you'll find a few hiccups, twitches, and glitches here and there. Its prebuilt components mean you won't be able to indulge your wildest flights of design fancy. And the earnest 'helpful hint' blurbs that pop up whenever you try something new in the program quickly start to feel a little too much like Microsoft's notorious Clippy.

But on the whole, it's my favorite app in this roundup by far. Free, $79.99 and up for licenses - Which app is best? If you just want an inexpensive way to build nice-looking, no-frills sites, TurboWeb's a solid bet. If you need to set up an online store without paying through the nose, consider EverWeb.

But if you want to get the most bang for your buck, you can't beat Blocs. If we've overlooked one of your favorite apps for web design — or if you just want to gripe about how text editors are the only way to build sites — please let us know in the comments below. This post may contain affiliate links.

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Read on for our detailed analysis of each app As with any great endeavor, web design is about both inspiration and perseverance. Back in the day, creating web pages was the sole province of hardcore coders, but that’s not the case anymore given that there are numerous tools to simplify the process. Some of these even have a visual interface, allowing you to drag and drop links, text and images as if you were designing a poster or presentation. Other web design tools are geared towards programmers, acting as advanced text editors, and allowing for building a website line-by-line. However, most web design tools exist somewhere between these two extremes. In this guide we have focused on five of the very best tools currently available.

When weighing up which to include, we have focused on ease of use, supported web languages, cost, and how easy the tools make it to upload the finished project once you are done. If this is your first time building a website we recommend using a free tool such as Bluefish before spending any money. All premium tools covered in this guide offer a trial version, in any case, so you can get an idea of what they’re about before you commit. If web design software is too complicated for you, then you might want to try online that focus on simplicity and ease of use rather than on offering an extensive feature set.

We’ve rounded up the best services. Sheer amount of features can be confusing is one of the best-known web design tools on the market and has been around in various forms since the turn of the century. The latest iteration of Dreamweaver is available as part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite for a fixed monthly fee of €24.59 (£21.60, $28.80). The tool has a broad appeal to both novice and advanced users.

When you first launch Dreamweaver, you'll be asked to choose between 'beginner', 'intermediate' and 'advanced' skill levels. These help to determine the number of features shown to you, and whether you’ll be given options to perform more complex tasks like building a site from code. Aside from a refreshingly designed and powerful interface, Dreamweaver supports virtually any type of web code from basic HTML to CSS, PHP and JavaScript to name just a few. If you are not quite ready to edit raw code, Dreamweaver supports WordPress and Drupal templates. Other advanced features include a 'live view' for previewing websites as well as support for certificates and a dedicated workspace for developers. If you're making your first venture into programming sites, Dreamweaver also offers tips for improving your code. The general consensus from user reviews is that while this web design tool is amazingly flexible, the arsenal of features can be truly overwhelming.

Fortunately Dreamweaver offers a free trial, so take some time to experiment and see if it's right for you. No visual interface is amongst the smallest web design tools available today. The tiny installer weighs in at just under 53MB and setup takes only a few moments. While the interface is text-only, it's clearly designed with novices in mind as it employs clear-cut toolbars, user customizable menus and syntax highlighting. While the main focus is on HTML, Bluefish supports a huge range of other languages including PHP, Java, JavaScript, SQL, XML and CSS. Unlike visual WYSIWYG web design tools, the text interface makes for much cleaner code.

Bluefish has an excellent search function, allowing you to find text across multiple projects. The tool also has no trouble juggling hundreds of documents at the same time. Although Bluefish supports working with remote files, the varied and useful dialogs and wizards don't currently support direct upload of web pages via FTP.

Despite the best efforts of the developers, Bluefish may take some time to get used to. The tool is available free of charge, however, so you have nothing to lose by giving it a try. During our test on a Windows 10 PC we found we had to install GTK+ 2.24.8 in order to run Bluefish.

A download link for GTK is available via the Bluefish website. No visual interface Described by its developer as a 'hackable text editor for the 21st Century', the free and open source comes to us from the team at GitHub. Atom is a dedicated desktop app and supports a variety of programming languages such as HTML, JavaScript, Java, PHP, CSS and XML. The text editor automatically recognizes the language you are using and will color-code and arrange it accordingly. Atom also has a useful autocomplete feature for writing code. You can manage multiple files at once via the excellent 'minimap' in the left-hand pane. As the interface is text-only Atom is geared towards more advanced users.

However, there are a number of freely downloadable extensions, such as 'packages', which can make this text editor a joy to use. Available packages include Emmet, which allows you to write HTML and CSS using abbreviated code. Another is Pigment which scans your script for color codes and displays these automatically in the background color. Atom is truly cross-platform as it is available for Windows, Linux and macOS. This makes it ideal for working on copyrighted material. And because it's open source the development community can quickly respond to any bugs or security flaws which are discovered.

Primarily designed for creating ads is primarily for creating interactive content in HTML5, JavaScript and CSS. In plain English, this means its primary function is to build ads. The good news is that this is done via an extremely simple to use GUI which incorporates point-and-click design tools covering text, basic shapes, 3D animations and much more. Any 3D features are shown on a timeline at the bottom of the window. The panels on the right-hand side of the interface allow you to fine-tune further options such as colors. Google Web Designer also incorporates a handy library of extra components such as images, videos and other advertising tools. Advanced users can toggle between the default 'design' view and 'code' view, which is why the tool can support creation of more advanced features besides ads – provided you have the knowledge and patience to program these yourself.

Google Web Designer is still in beta testing, so lacks certain features such as being able to open HTML files created outside the tool. Nevertheless, it does include a handy web preview option which will open your current project in your default browser. You can also automatically publish content.

This Google offering is available free of charge for Windows, macOS and Linux. Interface takes time to master is a cloud-based service which has been created specifically to allow people with no coding knowledge to get started with web design. Aside from being truly cross-platform, as it's web-based, Webflow emphasizes the concept of 'smart codelessness'. In the first instance this means a crisp drag and drop interface allowing you to drop elements such as text and images seamlessly onto a page using one of the freely available templates. Unlike many WYSIWYG editors, the code produced is very clean and well-written even if you choose the 'I have no coding experience' option during setup. Webflow's automation tool will create the necessary HTML/CSS code for you.

You can make granular changes to individual elements using the panels on the right. Webflow offers a free demonstration of its features via the website, and you can also subscribe for a free Starter package which allows you to create up to two projects. If you require more than this and/or need services too, prices start at $24 (£18, AUD$32) monthly. This is a little pricey compared to equivalent tools, mind you.

Webflow also has little support for e-commerce plugins or marketing tools. You can use a separate tool such as the aforementioned Google Web Designer to create interactive advertising content if you wish.

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