A tag editor is a specialized text editor program with some level of specific support for HTML coding, and maybe also for CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and suchlike; in other words, a Web-oriented programmer's editor. Tag editors are for people who like to edit their Web code directly.
If you are going to use a tag editor such as Notepad++ you may want to get a late version of the Opera Web browser. On Windows, Opera's default source code viewer is WordPad, but you can specify any editor you want (Tools, Preferences, Advanced, Programs) which is nice for Web development. To open a page for editing, you can then just display it in Opera and do View, Source (or press Control-F3). I've never understood why other browsers don't do this, at least as an option.
HTML conversion takes a document file from software you already have and know how to use—such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, or desktop publishing program—and converts it to HTML.
For a while this was often done in stand-alone programs created just for HTML conversion, or using conversion features of WYSIWYG HTML generators or tag editors. Now it's more likely that the originating word processor program (or whatever) will have HTML conversion as a native feature, and the more common issue now is the quality of the generated HTML code.
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Not all of these formats are actually relevant to primary Web page content, of course. There are also tools available for converting database tables to HTML tables.
When I was getting started editing HTML in '96, all the cyberpunks gleefully told me to use Windows Notepad ... those that didn't suggest DOS EDIT, anyway, or even "COPY CON." (Anybody remember EDLIN?)
I do use Notepad sometimes to edit HTML files; it's quick and small, and always saves text format, but it doesn't have a real "Search and Replace" feature. Notepad does have "Find" and "Find Next" text searching, and if you're clever, you can copy text strings to the Windows Clipboard and do some searching and replacing using F3 and the Clipboard Cut/Copy/Paste keystrokes (Control-X/C/V).
Notepad through Windows 95 had a 32K maximum file size; Notepad versions that came with Windows 98 and later seem to be able to open larger text files, 64K in the case of Win98, I think. Of course, if an HTML file is bigger than 32K, it's too big, period.
Since HTML files are just text files, any text editor with features you like can be used to edit HTML. You just won't have any specific support for or help with the HTML tags, unless you get busy and create some. Presumably this would include things like Brief, Emacs, vi, pico, QEdit, WordPerfect for DOS, etc.
There are several ready-made add-on packages around intended to be used with Emacs, to turn it into a tag editor; I haven't tried any of them, either under Linux or DOS. I suppose any text editor that has keystroke macros could be worked up to a spiffy HTML editing system fairly easily ... depending on your definition of "easy."
Win3 Write, Win95/98 WordPad, and MS Word can all be used directly as tag editors, if you're a bit careful about Save formats; this does get you away from Notepad's file size limit. In Write and Word, if you try to preview in a browser without closing the file first, generally the browser will complain the source file is in use (or sometimes even "not found"!). You'll have to close your HTML file before you can preview.
WordPad works pretty well as a makeshift HTML editor. The only catch: whenever you save a file opened as a text file, some WordPad versions nag you to save it as a DOC file. Make sure you read that dialog box the first time it happens; but as long as you always press T for text format, everything seems to go fine. Some WordPad versions seem to save to the format they opened without pestering you about it. (Maybe there was an Options setting I didn't find.)
If your choice of HTML editor doesn't have site-wide or "extended" search-and-replace, MS Word's Find File feature can actually come in handy, if used with caution. Find File has Advanced options that allow you to search for text inside files, and search a single directory or branch (similar to the Unix command GREP).
After you run a Find File seach, you get a dialog box listing all the matching files, and an Open pushbutton. Once you've opened a matching file, you can use the Replace function from the Edit menu to search-and-replace inside that file. I strongly recommend careful use of the case-by-case mode rather than Replace All. I'd also recommend, after you've saved your very first HTML file out of Word, that you immediately open it in your browser, to verify that your particular version of Word isn't doing anything strange to the text format.
Once you edit a file so it no longer contains the search text, Word neatly removes it from the list in the Find File dialog after you exit. Those Find File and Replace settings are "sticky," and whenever Word opens a text file it always defaults to saving as a text file; so it actually works pretty well for this purpose, for a bloated word processor.
Maybe you can figure this thing out.
Open-source FCKeditor ("FCK" being the developer's initials) is supposed to be an entirely browser and JavaScript based editor for HTML and other languages relevant to the Web. To me it appears only suitable for people who are already massively expert at JavaScript, but draw your own conclusions.
It also feels rather elitist and snobbish the way such a point is made of having no documentation or explanations. I had to dig into the forums to find out what I was supposed to do with the silly thing. I can see that you can get functional editor-style toolbars displayed in the browser, and apparently create and save HTML files, but there seems to be no way to open/edit existing files.
StatCounter.com is a free system for Website traffic statistics, provided your ISP lets you have JavaScript on your pages. You only have to pay monthly or desist using the service if your site traffic goes over 250,000 pageloads per month, which works out to about 8300 a day, or a pageload every ten seconds and a bit.
You can operate StatCounter in invisible mode, where there's no indication your site is using it unless a user views the HTML code. You can also have it show on your site as a 1990s style hit counter if you want, although that's been a disparaged practice for years.
Your users won't see any ads on your Web pages either. You'll see some small polite Google-style ads when you log in to the StatCounter site to look at your traffic stats, which are very complete and varied in nature. Among other things you can see info on new and returning users, country of origin, stay times and popular pages, and browser, OS, and screen resolution used. You get to see total, unique, and returning pageloads back to the start of your StatCounter account; the other stats are based on just your most recent 100 pageloads unless you upgrade to a pay account. StatCounter has been around since at least early 2002, and maybe since 1999.
In November 2005 Google launched a free traffic analysis service called Google Analytics, but almost immediately had to temporarily suspend signups due to insufficient capacity. There's now a lottery-style system that allows you to request a Google Analytics signup to be sent to you as capacity permits. One major difference: Google Analytics is free for up to five million page views per month, twenty times the traffic level supported by a free StatCounter account.
Using a Google "similar sites" search, I also found Motigo Webstats, another free traffic stats service. The site isn't speed optimized nearly as well as StatCounter, and its traffic stats are public only, accessed via an icon that appears on the tracked site.
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