Frontpage or Dreamweaver?

[Haz]

I read an old post about how Dreamweaver is alot better than Frontpage but no one really said why, and I haven't really heard anything bad about Frontpage except that its from Microsoft :D

Trying to learn about designing websites and even though Dreamweaver confuses the hell out of me I'd like to know why I should stick with it over Frontpage. Any advice? Thanks :)

[Ariel_001]

Frontpage 2003 is not too bad. See if you can get that. I think you should try learning the basics if you don't already know them..

[Skiz]

I read an old post about how Dreamweaver is alot better than Frontpage but no one really said why, and I haven't really heard anything bad about Frontpage except that its from Microsoft :D

Trying to learn about designing websites and even though Dreamweaver confuses the hell out of me I'd like to know why I should stick with it over Frontpage. Any advice? Thanks :)
Never used frontpage but I learned Dreamweaver by going through the tutorial that are included. It's pretty simple once you get going.

I think they're under help or tools or somethin.:huh:

[Smurfette]

I read an old post about how Dreamweaver is alot better than Frontpage but no one really said why, and I haven't really heard anything bad about Frontpage except that its from Microsoft :D

Trying to learn about designing websites and even though Dreamweaver confuses the hell out of me I'd like to know why I should stick with it over Frontpage. Any advice? Thanks :)
Dreamweaver creates clean code, whereas Frontpage tends to add superfluous shit that makes pages unnecessarily large. You may not think that's a problem, but there is a point at which some visitors tire of waiting and go somewhere else - around 20 seconds ISTR being quoted when I was building a site a few years ago.
I never really got on with the Frontpage interface, either. DW has everything handy to throw pages together whereas FP suffers from the usual M$ problem of hard to find functions - I seem to remember simply making a link to another page awkward, which is ridiculous.
I designed and published my whole site in DW, then my host ($99/year) deleted it for "excessive bandwidth usage" and I looked around for another. The one I settled on offered free FrontPage Extensions so I thought I may try adding some FP elements to take advantage. This was a very bad move because as soon as I added the site to FP the damned program went through every page and reformatted them... and completely fucked up the tables.

Whichever product you use, try not to use frames; use tables (and nest tables inside individual cells too, if needed) and just add common elements to each... DW is great for this because you can create a template page with all your navigation and layout set, and an editable area marked to be used for text/images etc. Then you just add text/images to a blank page, select 'apply template' and DW puts your bits into the editable area. You can make whole sections or even the whole site look exactly the same, then if you decide to change the layout the menu, add banners or something you only need to change the template file and DW will automatically change every page on the site that uses that template.

[Illuminati]

Smurfette pretty much got it spot on.

You can do more with Dreamweaver than you can do with Frontpage, but Frontpage is easier to write web sites for. Having said that, if you want to possibly go further than HTML (i.e. CSS and/or PHP) in the future, it's easier to code with DW than FP.

Frontpage Extensions are frigging useless. Seriously, they are - Apart from making uploading the web site easier to do, there's no real reason. However, web hosts need it set up for you to use it, and the "extra functionality" can be done with any decent amount of coding in the first place. That, and you can use FTP to upload them anyway, either directly or setting up DW to work on files remotely :)

The worst reason to have FP though is that bloody shite it puts into the code - The aim of any web designer should be to do a job in as little code as possible to make loading it easier on visitors, and all that's needed for a HTML page to run is two lines max. Frontpage puts this massive stamp on the code of any page that it loads & saves which will either increase the loading time or will force you to get rid of it using a text editor afterwards. Its purpose - So anyone who wants to read your code can know that it was made in Frontpage. :rolleyes: DW does not do that crap - It doesn't need to ;)

My main advice is use Frontpage to learn the basics of web site & HTML design. Once you know how to make a web site, ditch it and use Dreamweaver instead :)

[tesco]

also once you've got the basic layout it's good to start using Notepad2 which is what i did.
Then you can change stuff manually and you'll slowly learn the basics of html and stuff. :)

[orcutt989]

Yeah, what smurfette said. Haha dang.

[Haz]

Sweet, thanks alot everybody :)

That's about all I needed to know really. Don't want to use something that makes it difficult for visitors, so I'll stick with Dreamweaver for now and hope I can get a little more used to it.

Appreciate the help ;)