CoffeeCup Software is an American company that makes programs for building websites, email designs and online forms. Nicholas Longo founded it in 1996 in Corpus Christi, Texas, and its first product was the CoffeeCup HTML Editor, a program for writing HTML pages.
History of CoffeeCup Software
Creator: Nicholas Longo, founder. Year: 1996.
Nicholas Longo founded CoffeeCup Software in 1996. Before the company started, Longo owned a coffee house. It was called The Raven & The Sparrow, in Corpus Christi, Texas. The coffee house gave customers internet access for free. It was the only place in the city that did so then.
The coffee house already had the www.coffeecup.com domain name. So the software company took the name CoffeeCup Software. The first program was the CoffeeCup HTML Editor. Longo posted the program on his website. Later, the company charged US$20 for it. In 1996, Longo closed the coffee house. He put his full working time into software development.
CoffeeCup then built programs. They were for designing and editing responsive websites. It also built programs for online services that serve webmasters. Wikipedia says its third product, CoffeeCup Direct FTP, put text editing inside a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) program. The official site says the company has been family owned since 1996.
In spring 2007, the company moved to a new headquarters2. Wikipedia says the company then had just over 10 programmers and designers. It also used a group of about 8000 testers, called Ambassadors. They reported bugs. They suggested improvements. The headquarters is listed as Atlanta, Georgia, United States.
Wikipedia lists awards won for the CoffeeCup HTML Editor. The Shareware Industry Award was given six years in a row. It was given from 1999 to 20043. CoffeeCup also offers a K-12 Donation Program. Through it, public schools and public libraries can request the Educational Software Package. It is for classroom use.
Changelog and latest update
The product line changed over time. Wikipedia lists products such as Responsive Site Designer, Responsive Email Designer, CSS Grid Builder, Foundation Framer, Bootstrap Builder and Web Form Builder. The list also includes Direct FTP, Animation Studio, Image Mapper and Google SiteMapper. It also includes free versions such as CoffeeCup Free HTML Editor and CoffeeCup Free FTP 4.0.
The official home page now lists a website builder. It lists an email designer, a form designer and a code editor. It also lists one-click web hosting and form hosting under the S-Drive name. The company copyright notice on the site reads 2026. So the page was updated in that year. The site also links to a help centre with release notes for each product.
Latest update: Site Designer release, March 2026, 2026-03
CoffeeCup published the Site Designer release notes for the March 2026 release. They are on its help site. The release added a feature. It lets users test server-side files, such as PHP, on a local computer. Live Preview gained a Base URL setting. The browser opens a local web server address instead of a file path. Live Preview also gained a server-side code field. It is for code that must run above the HTML declaration. A new Mailto element creates mailto links. They have a subject, recipients, Cc and Bcc fields and a message body.
Usage examples
CoffeeCup products write HyperText Markup Language (HTML) pages, server files written in PHP, and upload files with FTP. The examples below show a basic HTML page, the Live Preview settings from the March 2026 release notes, a mailto link and a block of server-side code. The examples are for a site built in the CoffeeCup tools and uploaded to a web server.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Sample Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello</h1>
</body>
</html>This is the starting page that the CoffeeCup HTML Editor creates for a new file. The document type line tells the browser which HTML version to use. The head holds the title and the character set, and the body holds the visible content of the page.
Live Preview Local Path:
c:\xampp\htdocs\test
Live Preview Server Url:
http://localhost/testThese two settings come from the Site Designer release notes for March 2026. The local path is the folder where the page is saved on the computer. The server URL is the address that the browser opens, so PHP files run through the local web server.
<a href="mailto:hi@ex.com?subject=Hi">
Email us for a quote
</a>A mailto link opens the visitor's email program with the recipient address and subject already filled in. Site Designer adds these links through its Mailto element, which also sets Cc, Bcc and the message body.
<?php
// Server-side logic only, no output
$year = date('Y');
?>
<p>Copyright <?php echo $year; ?></p>The March 2026 release lets users place server-side code above the HTML declaration. The code in this example sets a year value without printing text, and the paragraph after it prints the year into the page.
References
These sources are outside Websnoogie and were checked on 2026-10-12.
CoffeeCup Software
Wikipedia
Encyclopedia article on CoffeeCup Software. It covers the 1996 founding in Corpus Christi, the coffee house origin of the name, the product list, the awards for the HTML Editor and the school donation program.
CoffeeCup Software Home Page
CoffeeCup Software, Inc.
The official home page. It lists the current product groups, including the website builder, email designer, form designer, code editor, web hosting and form hosting.
About CoffeeCup Software
CoffeeCup Software, Inc.
The company page with the family ownership statement, the 1996 start date and the mission text. It also links to the contact and support pages for the company.
Site Designer Release Notes March 2026
CoffeeCup Software, Inc.
The official release notes for the March 2026 release of Site Designer. They describe local PHP testing, the Live Preview Base URL setting and the new Mailto element.
CoffeeCup HTML Editor
CoffeeCup Software, Inc.
The product page for the HTML Editor, the first program of the company. It describes the code editing tool and links to its download and purchase pages.
CoffeeCup Help Articles
CoffeeCup Software, Inc.
The index of help articles for all CoffeeCup products. It lists the release notes, the setup guides for local PHP testing and the tutorials for Site Designer, which is the page to check for each new CoffeeCup release.
Editing pages by hand in Omaha
Omaha and Nebraska small businesses often start with a few plain pages. Some owners wrote those pages by hand in a desktop editor, such as the Coffeecup HTML editor. A desktop editor works on one computer. It does not host the page, send mail or check for broken links. We are not affiliated with that company. We mention it because a page on a computer is not yet a page on the internet.
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For a new site, we bundle a domain with CMS hosting. The name costs $24.99 and the hosting costs $149 in that bundle. You get a name, a home for your files and tools to update the site yourself. We explain each line before you pay, so you know what the bill covers.
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