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Welcome to Zoom Website Editor!

Getting started: choosing your website editor

There are essentially two types of website editor.

• The "What You See Is What You Get" editors which allow you to build your web pages graphically and then generate the code for you
• Text based web editors which allow you to edit your website code directly

The beginner will initially be attracted to the WYSiWYG editors because they seem to offer a quick and easy route to web site development. The downsides will soon become aparent:

• WYSiWYG editors tend to be expensive and complex. The learning curve of using the editor is additional to leaning about website development.
• Websites built from templates look machine-made, unprofessional, lacking in originality and humanity. When you try to break away from the template then you will face all sorts of problems and barriers to what you wish to achieve.
• The web pages produced by WYSiWYG editors are often badly formatted, clunky and contain unnecesary code. This makes them slow to load in the user's web browser. Bugs may be hard to find and even harder to fix.
• If you want to add a feature to your website which is unsupported by your WYSiWYG editor then you are out of luck. Such editors always omit a few essential features to encourage you to buy the next software "upgrade".

Zoom Website Editor is a simple text based editor with many additional features and tools to facilitate and accelerate your web development. Because you are writing the actual code for your web site, the only limit to what you can achive is your own imagination.

• Build a simple web site from sctatch or from a template and then add features to it as your knowledge increases
• Directly edit the web pages on your web server for instant results, or edit a test site before deployment for more complex web sites
• Suitable for beginners and for expert users
• under active development
• Free to use (including for commercial use) and open source. A donation is appreciated if you find the software useful.

How it works

Zoom Website Editor allows you to edit the files on your web server and maintains a backup copy of the file on your computer in the Documents\websites folder. You can edit an unlimited number of different web sites and switch quickly between them.

Select a file on your web site from the navigation pane on the left of the Zoom Website Editor main window.

Text files (generaly HTML, CSS or code script) are downloaded from your web site into a new Zoom Website Editor tab. Each editor tab contains a text editor, a web browser (it is a limited version of IE and therefore a rubbish browser but it gives some idea of what the page will look like) and a history tab. Multiple editor tabs allow a number of files to be open for editing all at the same time. If you mess-up then you can "undo" current edits or retrieve an earlier version of your web page from history.
Once editing is complete, any pre-existing disc file is saved to history, the new file is saved to your My Documents\WebSites{domain name} folder (or a subfolder of it) and then uploaded to the web site via FTP.

Non-text files such as images are downloaded over FTP from the web site to your My Documents\WebSites{domain name} folder or subfolder. The "edit" command is passed to Windows which will hopefully open the file in some external application for edit.
Once editing is complete in the external program then the Zoom Web Editor menu item "Upload this File to Web" may be used to return the edited file to the web server.

Contents

• [Chosing an Internet Service Provider] Domain names and webspace
• [Installation] of Zoom Website Editor
• [Setting up] for the first time
• [Navigating your web site], adding files and folders, setting access permissions
• [Editing files], HTML web pages, images and other files
• [Scripting] CSS styles, client and server-side scripting