Subtitle: Software also follows Sturgeon's Law
OK, I've been doing web stuff for quite a while now. I was around when Al Gore and I invented the Internet. (I actually was around at BBN and helped flip the big switch that turned off NCP on the old ARPANET) BLKK.com has been around since 1996 or so, and my company, Baranof Software, did a lot on the internet and developed one of the early products to present a web interface.
What does an Internet Geek like me want from his internet development tool? It's not that complicated, really. I want to spend my time developing content and arranging pages to be sensibly linked. I don't want to spend my time programming -- those days are behind me.
So I've been developing my site in Microsoft FrontPage for many years. This despite not being particularly fond of Microsoft, and knowing all the "bad things" about Front Page. FP requires special extensions to be installed on the server, it does things in non-standard MS ways, it generates "bad" HTML, etc. Oh, and it runs only on Windows, so as a Mac guy I've needed to go to another machine for editing. But FP does a couple of things really right for me: it handles all the menuing and navigation through a very intuitive (to me) visual display of the site plan, and it manages the look and feel in a simple and clear way. These positives made all the headaches worthwhile.
But Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to discontinue Front Page, so I went out looking for a replacement. Needless to say, Microsoft's replacements for FP (Expression Web and Visual Studio) don't handle the simple fundamentals that FP did.
There are a wide variety of solutions available, but the bottom line is that they are either too simple (iWeb and the on-line site development tools provided by most web hosting companies), or way too powerful in one dimension (tweaking the appearance of a site, e.g. DreamWeaver) or another (having a completely data-driven site, e.g. ColdFusion or Joomla). And they still don't do the menuing stuff for you in any reasonable way.
In the end, as you see, I went with a new-ish product called Sandvox from Karelia Software. It has a number of limitations and bugs, but was the best compromise I could find without spending the rest of the year searching.