[balinor]

Ideally we like to develop on an actual site, whether that be a completely new site in its final location, or on a copy of a site in a development directory. Always better to have the site functioning in its final location, as server settings can drastically affect what works and what doesn't.

As far as tools go, I'm an old school coder, so I prefer to edit code by hand. I use both UltraEdit and the template editor itself. Most of the sites we create are stripped of most of their tables, and all of the formatting is moved to the skin.css file, which makes it much easier to edit. We have also removed most of the 'template inside a template' kinds of situations (rectangle_bottom.tpl, bottom.tpl and copyright.tpl for example) so it is much easier to understand what is what. If you are still dealing with the tables, Dreamweaver can often help just to see how a table is cut up.