I currently use AOL Press for my web authoring software, but I’m looking into something more since it really only does the basic meat and potatoes stuff.
I was going to go with Microsoft Front Page, but I seem to remember soneone posting earlier (Opal maybe?) specifically to stay away from this.
So, what’s wrong with Front Page? And what’s right about any other web authoring software?
I don’t mind mucking about in the HTML, so I use Allaire’s HomeSite, but if you want a more WYSIWYG environment, a lot of people I know swear by Macromedia’s Dreamweaver.
I have Homesite. You can use it like FrontPage (typing on the page), or you can edit the html. It validates it and makes sure you complete tags as well.
I did all of my first homepage in FrontPage. It works OK if you don’t want to learn HTML, but since I do know HTML backwards and forwards at this point, I hate working with my old website pages and do any new pages in Homesite. (WYSIWYG editors muck up the fine control you need for really good pages.) I’ve heard very good things about Dreamweaver, too, but it costs twice as much as Frontpage. If you just want more control over your website, I’d recommend FrontPage; if you want to go on to more high-level coding, I’d go with Dreamweaver. I use Homesite exclusively now, but I never use the WYSIWYG features on it so I can’t say if they’re worth beans.
First don’t use Front Page. It adds a major lot of it’s own script crap to the pages. Plus, it often requires a server that has Front Page extensions, this costs $.
How about Netscape? It comes with Netscape Composer, if you download it all. Its free. I use it & make a lot of money with it.
Um, what? All the pages I did on Frontpage had standard HTML naming. Nothing special was required from the server at all.
If you do use Frontpage anyone you try to impress with the code will immediatly dismiss you as a noob. FrontPage is one of the worst you can use in terms of weird trash code, wacky structuring, and most problems down the line.
You best bet is Homesite. I hated it at first but after learning the tools quickly became my favorite. Next may be Dreamweaver, but only because the integration of Flash and their Fireworks package is nice.
Frontpage gives this code:
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=“Content-Type”
content=“text/html; charset=iso-8859-1”>
<meta name=“GENERATOR” content=“Microsoft FrontPage Express 2.0”>
<title>Untitled Normal Page</title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<p>Hi</p>
</body>
</html>
Hmmm, no webbots in the FrontPage code? Maybe they finally did something about it.
The complaint that FrontPage gives sloppy code assumes you’re using the older versions. FP 2000 is much cleaner, and, realistically, even the code that the worst FP version added had no real effect on anything. There’s a lot of bias just because it’s a Microsoft product.
However, a drawback is that you do need the server extensions installed on the website to have the functionality. Not all websites have it (some due to prejudice against bugs long ago fixed) and if yours doesn’t, you’ll lose the fancier features. In that case, something else might be better for you.
The best HTML authoring software is, and always will be, a plain text editor like Notepad or EMacs. So there. 
So speaks a man who’s never had to make changes on 700+ pages of a website. “Extended find and replace” rules! I learned HTML on notepad and still don’t use shortcuts for creating the initial page, but when you have a mega multi-page site a global tool is vital, and even a site with a dozen pages can benefit from a global tool. (the color-coded text is nice, too) I hear BBEdit is even better; the find and replace can do “starts with” and “ends with” changes, although a minor mess-up there and you can ruin the whole site. Heck, we had enough trouble when my boss did a find and replace on ‘">’. :eek:
I suspect the plain text editors are too much for those who don’t want to spend a significant amount of time polishing HTML. I recommend learning HTML, since there are some things WYSIWYG editors can’t do well at all and it’s vital for debugging, but it’s not necessarily worth the effort for the casual webpage maker.
I recommend Homesite if you know your HTML fairly well. As Gaudere noted, extended search and replaces are a godsend (especially when used in conjunction with “allow undo after save,” believe me). If you want something more WYSIWYGish, and have some time on your hands, I’d strongly recommend Dreamweaver. It integrates DHTML elements and Flash fairly easily, but it definitely has a steeper learning curve than something like FrontPage or Composer (OTOH, if you’ve ever used other Macromedia apps, you should catch on fairly quickly).
But, yeah, learn HTML, it works wonders. 
While we’re on the subject, any tips on how/where to learn HTML/JAVAScript/VBScript? I’ve been playing at http://www.htmlgoodies.com
I’m really having trouble finding good info on VBScript. I’m supposed to learn how to do Outlook forms for work.
I agree with the status quo - Frontpage is best steered clear of, and Homesite rocks.
Dreamweaver comes highly recommended, but I never liked it. It seemed to make things slower for me, not faster, so I must do things in a different way to other folks.
But the extended Find and Replace is the killer.
Whatever you do, if you hear of an Australian app called HotDog, get the hell AWAY from it as FAST AS YOU CAN!!! It is a memory hog, a clunky useless load of nonsense, and tries hard to be as good as Homesite but hasn’t got a whelk’s chance in a supernova of it ever happening.
Are these of any help?
http://www.zdnet.com/devhead/
http://xlink.zdnet.com/cgi-bin/texis/xlink/xlink/search.html?Utext=VBScript+Outlook+forms&Uch=Developer&db=zd
You might want to try other keywords to search by for that second link; I used “VBScript Outlook forms”.
http://www.javascript.com is fun!!!
Also, way cool, http://www.google.com/ has a feature where you can use it to put a search button for searching your own web site. Very slick, worlds fastest search engine. Free for your site if you choose that option. ***** five stars.
I make web sites for a living and Tracer is right. Notepad is the best. Although for some sites I have to go to wordpad because of the file size. There does come a time though when a site gets complicated enough that a product like Dream Weaver can really help out.
It’s good to learn html because even if you are using a web authoring tool, it helps a lot to be able to look at your source code and understand what the heck it’s doing.
One more thing that comes in really handy about Homesite is the fact that it color codes your code, so things that are within quotatin marks are one color, ASP is another color, and so on and so forth. This really helps one with those instances when it’s really late and you forget to add a closing quotation mark somewhere.
Snippets (little chunks of HTML that you can set to hotkeys) are also great time savers as they allow you to create and/or format things such as large tables in just a few short seconds. In a way, it’s all the versatility of templates and stylesheets with the convenience of a macro. And, of course, used in conjunction with templates and CSS, you can add pages to your site in no time flat.
</shameless plug>
One more thing, I believe there’s a free/shareware app that’s basically a notepad-like program that’s optimized for writing HTML. All the simplicity of notepad (kinda), but it color codes your code for you, as I just described Homesite doing. I’d imagine it’d be a fairly useful tool for free…
It’s called NoteTab Pro. Great program. Here’s a link: