I had the hardest time trying to figure out how to turn off autocomplete in Aptana Studio. Which means only two things: That turning off autocomplete is very straightforward and obvious and it just took me a long time to figure it out. Or that no one has gone to the effort to explain how to do it. I’m assuming and hoping for the latter. Here’s how:

Window->Preferences->Web->HTML Files->Editor->Typing

And then uncheck everything. You should be good to go.

You have two options when it comes to deciding what width to make your website. You can have it expand the whole width of the viewers browser. Or you can have it set at a fixed size. Even if you have your page expanding the whole width of the browser, you’ll have to decide on a minimum width for your display to set to.

Personally, I cater towards a screen size of 1024 x 768. The web page you are viewing now has a fixed width of 900 pixels. Here is a list of widths of what other websites are using:

Here are some statistics on screen size usage from w3schools.com

More specific screen resolution statistics from w3schools.com.

1. A well designed, simple, and scalable logo. Your logo is the heart and soul of your organization. Your website should be designed around the style of your logo. If you want to see what really good logos look like, click here.
2. Unique, well-written, and fresh content. Useful content gives visitors an incentive to return and refer others.
You feel safe and secured buying a computer from Apple. How you present your website is extremely important.
3. Simple and obvious website navigation. Make sure your visitors are not getting lost.
4. A great domain name. A simple and easy-to-remember domain name will help you to build your brand and retain loyal visitors.
5. Pleasant and simple cross-browser-compatible design. It is important to make sure that your website is accessible for all users regardless of the browser or monitor that is used to view it.
6. High quality images. Poor quality images will make your website appear amateur.
7. Fast-loading pages. In the first few seconds of visiting your website, a visitor decides to stay or go. It is important that you site loads quickly enough for them to view your website and make the decision for themselves.
8. Unique titles, headlines, and meta descriptions for each page. Titles, descriptions, and headlines are important to search engine optimization. This is so critical for the success of your organization. There’s no point in having a good looking website if no one can find it.
9. Contact information or a contact form. It is a great idea to display contact information because it inspires trust. As an alternative, you can also provide a contact form which is a great way to capture leads, get feedback, or provide visitors with an easy way to contact you.
10. Custom error pages. Without fail, visitors will visit pages that do not exist. Perhaps an external website linked to a wrong page. Or maybe they mistakenly entered a url in their browser. By creating custom error pages, you can provide your users with a seamless user experience and provide them quick access to whatever they are looking for.

I have been developing websites for 7 years now, and I’ve gone through so many text editors in my quest for finding the perfect text editor. I will go through now and give you my opinion on all the text editors I’ve used. Let me say now that this review are for the programmers who hard code every single line and pixel.

Dreamweaver was the first IDE I ever used for developing websites. It has a nice color scheme and the ftp support is very solid. The only draw back is that it can be a little slow at times to upload and download files. Dreamweaver supports auto-upload on save command. It also nicely synchronizes all your server files with your local files. It feels good to know that I always have the latest back up of my website. What I don’t like about it is that it’s a very heavy program. It’s designed not just for coders, but also for designers. There are more configuration options than I care to think about. It’s also a very expensive piece of software.

Next comes Notepad++. This text editor is so close to being the perfect text editor. If it had a better ftp plugin, I would give this editor a grade of a 100. Sadly though, the ftp plugin is quite annoying. First, if you are editing a file for more than 15 minutes without using the ftp, the plugin will automatically disconnect and collapse your tree structure. I get quite a few errors when trying to run general operations like save or download. There have been a few times where the ftp plugin lost some of my files. When downloading, it would download 80% of the file without displaying an error. So if I was editing code somewhere along the top, and a uploaded the file back to the server, I would lose the bottom 20% percent. If you have WAMP server and you are coding locally, Notepad++ is perfect. But if you have to edit files through ftp, It can be a little frustrating.

Next comes Aptana Stuido. I was very excited when I heard and read about Aptana. First, their ftp support is very good. I can actually open up multiple ftp sites, and drag and drop files between them. It also has nice CSS support like Dreamweaver. The downside is that it’s written in JAVA. Not to say there is anything wrong with JAVA applications, but it can be a little slow at times. Sometimes, I feel like there is a small delay between my keystrokes and the text display. It’s not the most stable program and Aptana has crashed enough for me to make that comment. Sometimes, the FTP can be slow and I just end up using Filezilla to transfer images and videos. It’s a bit of a hassel to set up at first because you have to install the PHP and JQuery packages in order to start editing files. But, I’m just being really picky. Aptana is still a good Web Development IDE and it’s the application I use when I develop websites on Windows. Although, it’s definitely not my default text editor. It’s still a little too heavy to get that kind of treatment. Notepad++ gets that award.

Finally we have Coda! It’s just a beautiful text editor. It’s lightweight, but at the same time, you can do so much with it. It’s FTP support is fast and stable. It almost feels like I’m browsing a local directory. I just get things done faster when working in Coda, and I also feel happier. This is the difference between free open source software and paying for software. Coda cost a $100 to use. But it’s true that you get what you pay for. All the other text editors listed above are free. Also take note that Coda is only for Mac OS.

Which now brings up another question. Should you develop websites on a Mac or a Windows PC?

Honorable Mentions

Gedit – Gedit is for linux. I feel like I spend more time trying to customize it and make it my perfect text editor than actually programming on it. But it’s very good.

UltraEdit – This text editor is not free. But it’s pretty good. I didn’t actually purchase it because Aptana could do everything I needed to do while still being free. UltraEdit is like Notepad++, but with better support.

I was having a problem trying to create new files inside my web server. Every file I created would display a 500 Internal Server Error. I thought it was a problem with my web hosting company. It turns out that it was an issue with my default file permission setting. Using Aptana, it would create a file with default permission of 666, which can cause php to not be able to parse the file. This is what causes the 500 Internal Server Error.

To fix this, simply change the file permission to 644, which is also (rw- r– r–). Now all your files will display normally.

Notes

This is how you change the default file permissions under Aptana Studio.
Window->Preferences->Aptana->Permission

Also, Aptana has the default directory permission set to 777 (rwx rwx rwx). It would be safer if you changed the default permission for directories to 755 (rwx r-x r-x).