Only a few years ago, there were so many applications that would offer you everything you need to create your own website or homepage. Microsoft Frontpage, Adobe GoLive, Macromedia Dreamweaver were professional design tools that required some knowledge of the tags required to generate a web page. However, these tools also encouraged web designers to learn the tags required. It’s far easier to type your code manually, be presented with a realtime preview and also have the facility to upload your pages to a remote site to preview online.

These days we’ve crossed over to template-based web design tools. Why? Possibly as there have been so many conflicting web standards that few people had time to specialise in Flash, CSS as well as the ability to connect your site to either a database or e-commerce engine. Therefore the market for these tools declined, whereas the market for ease-of-use became paramount. To be fair, applications such as Rapidweaver make web creation easy.

Coda is a tool for the Mac that doesn’t work around existing templates. Indeed, it’s a tool designed for web professionals and those seeking to take up web design, professionally. It enables you to create and manage your sites, using the Site window. Open and edit any page of your site using the Edit window, whilst you can get an instant preview of the page using the Preview window. The tabbed nature of the application means you can open and edit multiple web pages. You can also add and edit CSS for your site or individual pages.

If you need to refer to the tags you’ll require for your pages, Coda ships with a number of dynamic books that can be accessed from within the application. When you’ve finished your pages you can upload or download from the remote site.

Coda 1.5 contains a number of new features, including support for code sub-version control, a find and replace option across multiple local files, clip support and much more.

The new Coda 1.6 now supports plugins.