Which do you use for your websites? Dreamweaver can be more expensive, probably due to the fact it is newer and there are few older versions around. What can Dreamweaver do that Frontpage can’t?
Try Notepad and the KISS principle.
This is probably better suited to the IMHO forum. It may also initiate a flame war.
I’ve used both. Extensively.
My choice? Dreamweaver, hands down. I can create standards-compliant web sites independent of the web server platform, available for viewing by any web browser. I can tweak individual web pages if need be and not have to fire up DW to accomplish that task.
FrontPage cannot do that.
If cost is a factor, there are plenty of freeware/shareware and low-cost code level and WYSIWYG HTML editors that can do practically everything FP and DW can do, but without the learning curves (and FP-based web crap).
(As I preview this post, someone mentioned Notepad. There are better freeware and shareware text editors out there optimized for web page creation that now surpass Notepad. Even the freeware version of NoteTab is leaps and bounds better than Notepad.)
Your mileage may vary.
DW can clean up the Og-awful code that Front Page barfs out. Strike that. DW fixes Word HTML, which is also horrid. But FP code is pretty strange in its own way, and requires a web server running what’s called “Front Page Extensions” to properly assemble all the little pagelets, code snippets and whatnots into a page understandable by your web browser. DW’s code runs on anything without assistance.
DW has some splendid site management tools - I can update a page, correct a typo, change a picture, whatever, then hit the Synchronize button. DW checks my local files against what’s on the web server and uploads only whatever’s been changed. I can make changes on many pages in my site in one day, or over a the span of a couple days, and not have to pay attention to what files are changed - Synchronize does the grunt work.
Given the choice between the two…
I agree with Duckster. IMHO Dreamweaver writes much cleaner code, is 100 times easier to troubleshoot and integrates well with other Macromedia products like Flash (which I use alot).
Any fool can write HTML by hand by why bother? Besides, unless you are making a Here’s-me-and-my-cat webpage, you will want to go beyond basic HTML. Let’s see you write the Amazon.com site in Notepad. If all you want to make is a personal site, then neither Dreamweaver nor FrontPage is a good choice and you would be much better off using something with a less steep learning curve.
You can, of course, get trial versions of both applications and try them out and see which you prefer. In the end, the best software to use is the one you feel comfortable with and are actually willing to learn how to use.
I’ve never used either, but as a design pro and a Web host, I’d have to say DW.
FrontPage uses “frontpage extensions” which have to be installed on the server, then FP uses some weird proprietary crap code to make stuff like forms and counters and …just ech.
Of course you can use FP without the fancy stuff and make your own code, but if you’re an HTML novice you’re not gonna learn a darn thing about HTML or making a Web site by using FP. And you’re not going to have the control you want.
DW is more “pro”. Even tho I don’t like my designer to use it, I know that alot of pro Web design shops use it. Some of its code is weird (most annoying: waaaayy too many font tags) but none of it is proprietary.
My vote is to use DW and continually look at the code to learn what is going on as you click and drag stuff around. Eventually you won’t need it.
And as a step-up from DW to Notepad (you don’t need to go that extreme…) check out Macromedia’s Homesite.
My god with all the free decent text editors around why would anybody try to develope anything with note pad.
DW, hands-down. I love the way it generates standards-compliant code. I have it set to generate XHTML, which I use in conjunction with Cascading Style Sheets. In fact, I originally learned HTML my creating my pages in an early version of DW and then studying the code (I found this was better than studying other people’s code, because with my pages, I knew exactly what I had created, and so looking that the raw code showed me exactly what I had done.)
A few years ago I was doing volunteer work designing and hosting Web sites for non-profit organizations. One of our clients brought in a pre-designed site which had been created with FrontPage, and wanted us to keep it up to date for her. Talk about a nightmare - the FP-generated code, which was created on a Windows machine, wasn’t even cross-platform compatible (our shop used Macs). I ended up having to completely recreate the site from scratch, which pissed off the original designer to no end…
In any case, it’s always a good idea to use a standalone text-editor in conjunction with any WYSIWYG editor. On my Mac, I use BBEdit; on Windows I recommend HomeSite (does that still come bundled with the Windows version of DW?) for viewing and tweaking the raw code. I’ve never liked the text-code handling of any of the WYSIWGY editors.
Well, I just wanted to pipe-in and say that I use FrontPage… mainly because I already had a copy of FP 2002 when I first got my domain name. Yes, FP can be a pain in the ass, but FP2003 is pretty good at writing decent HTML code and stripping a lot of MS-specific stuff out of it (if you tell it to). A lot of people forget that MS actually bought FrontPage from Vermeer Technologies (cite) and it’s taken them a while to make a decent product of it. (Actually, they bought Vermeer for FrontPage, but whatever.)
Having said that, if I had to do it all over again, I;d probably use DW. But I’ve never had to pay for any version of MS Office (it’s great being a beta tester and MS reseller, lemme tell you!) so I use FP.
I use a text editor and raw, hairy-chested HTML code.
One of these days I may get around to converting my site over to Dreamweaver, which would simplify maintenance of my left-margin navigation bar, but otherwise I have little reason to switch.
My site is fairly plain-vanilla (few graphics, no Flash, no animation), but is pretty information-rich. I use Cold Fusion for database access and dynamic page creation, and, yes, I do that with a text editor also.
You gotta problem with that?
Oh, just to emphasize how much of a dinosaur I am, my text editor is KEDIT32, the PC version of the old mainframe editor XEDIT. Yeah, it’s antediluvian, but I have never found anything to beat it for columnar operations. I can take a list of 15,000 document names, and, with a couple of column-based operations, turn it into a batch file to migrate and transform the documents to a whole new directory tree structure. Very few other tools allow this sort of thing anywhere near as easily.
Whoa, whoa, there’s nothing wrong with Notepad. [Old Codger Voice] Back in my day, we didn’t have all these graphical editors. [/Codger]. Well, ok, we did, but I didn’t use them. I’ve since switched to UltraEdit, because it has syntax highlighting for just about every language you can think of. Also it was what we used in my Java programming classes in school and I got used to the interface. There’s a lot to be said for the force of habit.
My current job involves maintaining a bunch of sites, most of which were programmed in Dreamweaver, and I must say that DW’s template system leaves a lot to be desired. It generates hideous code, replete with <FONT> tags (I had no idea people were still using these things until I started there!) and if you’re not working from inside the Dreamweaver environment, navigating that code can get ugly. Still, I’d recommend Dreamweaver over FrontPage any day. Microsoft shows virtually no support for web standards, and I just can’t get behind the company that unleashed Comic Sans on this unsuspecting world…
Ultra Edit is a very good text editor, complete with HTML support.
You can use the Commands in DW to clean up the font tags problem. Actually, it’s so much easier to use CSS.
Yeah, tell me about it. It makes me mad that even the newer versions of Dreamweaver use font tags as the default method of styling text. Combine that with a whole load of part-time developers who fear plain HTML and can’t be bothered to learn stylesheets, and you have an hour a day added to my workload, easy.
Actually, can you elaborate a bit on KEDIT? I spent some time as an information developer for IBM back in the day, and I loved loved loved XEDIT. I’d love to get my hands on a really good text editor, and I’m wondering if KEDIT would fit the bill.
(And yeah, I got to a near-guru level of expertise with GML–you can imagine my horror when I saw what early web designers were doing to my dear, sweet markup language…)
Here you go:
http://www.kedit.com/ .
I use Dreamweaver MX and Frontpage '02 every day, depending on what building I am developing websites in. Dreamweaver is more powerful, though i have found it is buggy when you start getting heavily into scripting. More than once i’ve had it encounter an error it’s not equipped to handle and suddenly i’m staring at my desktop. I recommend Frontpage for beginners. Its got a nice intuitive interface thats similar to Microsoft Word and other MS products.
My personal preference though is TopStyle. Its got a very very nice and comfortable interface and it has the Jazzy buttons and menus that are easily made in .NET. As a matter of fact you can arrange the windows into any design you prefer very easily. I love it. Its designed around creating standards compliant websites in CSS and XHTML.
My WAG 
Dreamweaver has been arround since 1997. Since then it’s been through versions 1-4 (with some .# inbetween), MX and now MX 2004.
In addition to what other people have said, I find that Macromedia provide very nice and easy to follow tutorials, and there is a HUGE Macromedia community.
The Developer Centre will provide you with as many mods and add-ons as you could possibly ever hope for, and the Newgroup Forums are extremely quick and helpful.
Plus, almost any web design magazine you pick up will have some sort of tutorial for how to do the latest wonder on DW, I haven’t seen the same sort of support for Front Page.
Hi chuckster, opinions and polls belong in IMHO. I’ll move this to IMHO for you.
-xash
General Questions Moderator
TopStyle is a CSS editor. It will not create web pages. However, it’s great when used with Dreamweaver and HomeSite.