You do not have to have Dreamweaver to churn out web pages, simple text editors like Notepad can do the trick. However, there are some criterias to what are good text editors for web development: generally you want something to give you syntax coloring/highlighting and syntax hinting. Word Processors like Microsoft Word are not good choice because they add text formatting and layout features. There are free ones and commercials ones, here is a brief summary.

Name Description Retail Price/Link
Notepad For beginners, it is a good start to learn hand coding. However, because the notepad does not have any syntax coloring/highlighting, it makes very difficult for web developers to use in large project. Free, come installed on any Windows PC.
Notepad ++ Notepad++ is a free source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License Free, www.notepad-plus-plus.org
BBEdit BBEdit is a commercial HTML and text editor for the Macintosh. Its features include editing, searching, and manipulation of text. The interface includes grep pattern matching, search and replace across multiple files (even unopened files on remote servers), project definition tools, function navigation and syntax coloring for numerous source code languages... $125 individual license, Bare Bones Software
TextMate Excludsive for Mac. Themable Syntax Highlight Colors, Auto-Pairing of Brackets and Other Characters, Foldable Code Blocks Column Selections and Column Typing
Completion of Words from Current Document
CSS-like Selectors to Pinpoint the Scope of Actions and Settings		 $50 www.macromates.com
Microsoft Expression Web Professional Microsoft Expression Web, code&$45;named Quartz, is a WYSIWYG HTML editor and general web design program by Microsoft. It is part of the Expression Studio suite. $149; www.miscrosoft.com
     
     
     

 

text editor dreamweaverDreameaver is a very sophiscated text editor or web authoring tool. Dreamweaver allows users to preview websites in locally-installed web browsers. Its transfer and synchronization features, the ability to find and replace lines of text or code by search terms and regular expressions across the entire site, and a templating feature that allows single-source update of shared code and layout across entire sites without server-side includes or scripting. The behaviours panel also enables use of basic JavaScript without any coding knowledge, and integration with Adobe's Spry AJAX framework offers easy access to dynamically-generated content and interfaces.