BlueGriffon is a free WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) HTML editor powered by Gecko, the rendering engine inside Firefox. It is cross-platform with versions for Windows XP and Windows 7, Mac OS X, and popular Linux distributions. There is also a portable version (Windows only).
Like its predecessor, NVU, BlueGriffon provides an easy-to-use interface and includes all the most common options for creating web pages that comply with the W3C web standards (HTML 4, XHTML 1.0, HTML 5 or XHTML 5 / CSS 2.1 and parts of CSS3 already implemented by Gecko).
A handy wizard guides users through setting up their canvas, starting with selecting the document type, filling in property details, choosing colors, adding a background image, and deciding on page layouts.
The interface is intuitive and almost basic at first, closely mimicking the layout of a word processor’s toolbar. The icons for the most common options are clearly arranged: adding a table, a single image, or a thumbnail with a link to a large image, a link, a video, an audio file, or a form to a web page is easy. Switching from the WYSIWYG view (where you can organize objects visually) to the web page source view (where you can manipulate the web page by editing the HTML code) is done by clicking the two buttons at the bottom of the page. Multiple web pages can stay open in multiple tabs, making it easy to quickly switch between documents, copy and paste, and more.
Adjusting styles can be done through the style properties panel, which would require some coding knowledge for most other than the most basic features. For example, it’s easy enough to change the color of a font or adjust the style of a border, but while the style properties organize the many style options fairly neatly, most of the available style options probably won’t be immediately understood. immediate by novices: this makes BlueGriffon more suitable for intermediate coders.
Another drawback of BlueGriffon if you start creating your first website design is the lack of proper documentation (offline or online) yet. If you’ve used any decent web builder tools before, or if you want to create a fairly basic page, this shouldn’t be much of a problem. However, if you are a beginner to website coding, you might find yourself stuck at some point without much help available. Hopefully the BlueGriffon documentation will improve over time, starting with some tutorials on creating new pages and sites and developing your forum.
On the other hand, one of BlueGriffon’s strengths are plugins: the most obvious is the free FireFTP plugin to easily publish your page from BlueGriffon. Most other plugins must be purchased for a small fee to support future development, according to the BlueGriffon website. The CSS Pro Editor extension, for example, is much more powerful than the default CSS toolbox and gives web authors full control over their style sheets. Some popular paid extensions are the Mobile Viewer plugin (for testing your pages with a large number of mobile devices), Eye Dropper (a color picker that allows web authors to choose a color from fonts that cannot be viewed or edited directly within the editor), the Project Manager plugin (a synchronization tool between a local directory on your hard drives and a remote directory accessible via FTP), the Snippets plugin (useful when manipulating the exact same piece of HTML code or text within docs) and the Toolkit Manager plugin. It is possible to buy all the plugins at once at a discounted price on the publisher’s website.
Clicking the Preview button will open the webpage in any browser of your choice (provided it’s already installed on your system, of course), which is useful for cross-browser testing, to check how your webpage looks. page in Internet Explorer or Google. chrome for example. This is also useful for checking your scripts, as these will not be executed directly in BlueGriffon.
The Markup Cleaner that can be found in the Tools menu can help you clean up your HTML code. You can also spell check your pages and BlueGriffon even integrates a small SVG editor (svg-edit, originally distributed as a Firefox plugin and ported to BlueGriffon) for quick drawing jobs.
BlueGriffon is a very promising open source and cross-platform web editor. With only version 1.31, of course it can’t directly compete with massive and expensive web development applications like Adobe Dreamweaver, but this is already a very good application for creating web standards compliant pages without too much effort. It’s also a great tool for educational purposes, like teaching design students the basics of HTML and CSS. The documentation and online forums need to be improved but, once it gets traction and support from the community, it could quickly become much more popular.