As members (and many readers) likely know, Web Professionals runs a national web design contest every year. This year will be our 15th year. For the past decade, we have recorded the technology used by individual team members to create their web pages. As one may expect a number of different editors are used. Each team has their preferred editor. For most of this time, we noticed Dreamweaver as the premiere editing tool being used by high school students and post-secondary students. This morphed in recent years to many using Sublime Text, Atom, or Brackets. We also saw an uptick in the use of Adobe Muse. We recognize many practicing professionals use a variety of tools. We also saw this week that Adobe announced the end of feature updates for their Muse product. We then heard from a number of teachers that they are concerned about the demise of Muse (many teach design students, not those specializing in web technologies). Frankly, we were surprised that so many have come to rely on Muse as an entry to creating web pages. We also have seen Adobe Spark being used. Editor’s note (August 19, 2022) Adobe Spark is now Adobe Express.

We recognize there is a disconnect between what is being taught in schools and what practicing professionals need to know. We see this first hand every year in the comments from judges in our web design competition. As one may suspect, we focus on web standards, process, and user experience (and don’t promote any specific editor). We do see trends and were surprised to see Muse being used in the competition for a couple of years.

This got us thinking about editors in general for web pages. We would like feedback from those visiting this page. What is your preferred editor for web pages? We have included a list of some editors which we have seen being used in our national competition (along with a few others we use). It would be most helpful if you took a moment and voted as to your preferred editor. If you don’t see it on the list, please let us know via comments. We set this poll to display these editors in a random order (trying not to influence the results).

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Of course, this brings up the bigger question of what should be taught in schools (particularly high schools). We have been promoting web standards and user experience, not specific tools. Does this still make sense? We are keen to learn your thoughts and look forward to a number of insights and comments.

Best always,

Mark DuBois
Executive Director and Community Evangelist