My Experience with CoffeeCup HTML Editor

For Activity 6

I began searching for the HTML editor software in week one. I was nervous and excited about this activity as I did not even know what an HTML editor program could do. My experiences with Netscape Composer had been good, but I had received a lot of help from the CTER staff when I first made my electronic portfolio. I felt like I had really only filled in the blanks and made some color decisions when beginning that project. I tried a few programs as I mentioned in Program’s Appeal. I decided to stick with CoffeeCup quite early in my search, however I did not feel confident enough to actually start the page for the activity. I had so little experience with any HTML editor programs that I was unsure of where to start.

I tried using the Quick Start Wizard to set up the background and colors for the fonts. I had a difficult time getting the color scheme I wanted to save. I finally ended up changing colors within the document. This is something that I would spend more time with if I were to use this software on future work. However, I found out how easy it is to change colors and fonts because of this difficulty. We learn from mistakes and that is certainly the approach I used. The first week I started many new pages to test out heading sizes and spacing, but saved nothing. For 2 weeks I inserted graphics and text and used preview to see how the insertions looked or worked. I began to add HTML tags myself to beginnings and endings of text if I saw that I had missed a bold or center tag. I had never done this before, and I feel that I learned a great deal about HTML while using this program. Finally at the end of week 2 I felt I was ready to begin developing the pages for activity 1 and 6. I had made practice pages, but nothing that I was willing to save. If I were to do it again and knew how easy it is to make changes I would save work from the beginning. I typed my title and introductory paragraph many times!

I am still unsure of how to change the margins and was given HTML links by the help site to learn how to do this. It was very reassuring to a beginner to have the live help available whenever I had a question, however I did feel that there was an expectation of knowing HTML if one was using the program. This seems a little odd to me as the editor program takes much of the HTML work out of making a page. I tried to add flash animation, a snippet, and a dynamic HTML script and none of them worked in preview. I tried to add a US waving flag cosmic cursor, but an additional download for the cursor was needed and not included with the trial version of CoffeeCup. The items like java scripts that I was able to insert came with excellent directions about placement in the page and what to change to individualize them.

One feature I plan to continue working with is the insert form. I really wanted my web page for Activity 1 to have a table at the bottom that each rectangle would be a link to the parts of the project rather than a list of links. This is something that would be put at the bottom of each page for a navigational aid. However, I need more practice with this, as I was not able to complete it to use yet. I have decided to purchase the program so I can continue working with this in my free time. Another feature I will pursue is the Quick Post feature so that I can add information to a web page by just inserting at the designated place. I also would spend more time setting up the right click capability of uploading to the server. I spent a fair amount of time saving, opening WFTP, logging in, transferring and testing the pages. Once the upload server was identified, I was supposed to be able to upload by right clicking on the page. This would be a wonderful timesaving feature.

If my school were using/buying an HTML editor program like Dreamweaver or FrontPage it would have made sense for me to use this opportunity to try it out. However, I did not have that need. I found CoffeeCup HTML Editor to be a fun program with many great features. Now that I have experience with an HTML editor program I will be better able to evaluate other programs if my district chooses to purchase one.