Reference: RidgeStar-Development

The computer industry has experienced an explosion in programming aids that are intended to assist businesses, organizations, and other non-computer layman onto the Web. It seems that everywhere we turn, someone is selling or giving away one of these latest, greatest Web development tools.

At RidgeStar, we've been in the computer industry almost forever and have lived through the "latest and greatest development tool" phase more times than we care to remember. There's no question that many of the Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tools are fine and productive. In fact, our Web Servers are configured to interact with many of these tools.

However, (can you hear the other shoe drop?) we feel that the latest and greatest tools can not successfully replace professional, straight ahead coding, design, and organizational techniques, which have been around since the beginning of the stored program concept. So . . . we build all RidgeStar sites with "real HTML" editors and tools. This means that among other technologies and skills, we possess an in-depth knowledge of HTML, the different nuances of various Browsers, Java, Server Side logic, SQL Databases, and related Internet services (DNS, IP routing, etc.).

While we've used a bunch of the "HTML Editor" tools over the years (and continue to experiment with whatever new thing shows up), we've settled on one specific tool we primarily use while editing and creating sites.

Geany

An Open Source HTML Editor for use on the Linux desktops. Geany supports a wide variety of desktop environments and we've found it to be an excellent tool.

Our hats are off to the dedicated group of developers providing Geany under the GPL

These sorts of tools are not for everyone because they require that you understand how different elements such as Web Pages, HTML, various scripting languages all relate to each other. However, we think they are truly quality tools and we thank their authors for creating tools that allows us to produce supportable, powerful Sites.

If you want a Site created with a GUI interface or just a hunk of disk space so you can build your own Site, RidgeStar is not the right place to go (we can do it, but we simply believe it is too difficult to maintain successfully). On the other hand, if you're looking for an efficient, supportable Site built with our reputation in mind, then RidgeStar is the place. If you compare our Service Fees with other Internet Service companies, you'll see that the only way we can be successful is if our Site code is clean and effective.

We happily stand by our Web building approach!