I have to build and maintain a website for a professional organization and need suggestions on what software I might look at buying. I worked as a graphic designer for a long time and did some web design in the olden days (1999-2000), but have been out of the loop for a while.
Can I ask what web / server technology you are planning to use? (Java vs .NET vs none)
I don’t know . . . should I know this?
You can’t go wrong with Dreamweaver.
Since you’re a graphic designer, you’ll be more comfortable in a WYSIWYG environment, and Dreamweaver provides the best I’ve seen in that arena. As you get more comfortable editing the code by hand, Dreamweaver allows that too. I’m guessing you’ll be working strictly in HTML and handing your work off to a developer who will plug it into their ASP or .NET or PHP programming, so while knowing the web/server technology would be helpful, it’s not completely necessary.
Anyway, if your employer is paying for it, definitely go Dreamweaver. If it’s up to you to pay for it, go Notepad.
There are much better freeware and low-cost options to using Notepad if you cannot afford a professional product such as Dreamweaver.
NoteTab and UltraEdit both come to mind as inexpensive, but very powerful text editing tools with builtin web creation capabilities.
Not saying it’s right for you, Jennshark, or what your budget is, but I used to use NetObjects Fusion several years ago, and I’m sorely tempted to buy the latest version. It’s $200.
Dreamweaver is, of course, superb, but I ended up using NOF because it was so much quicker to do what I needed. YMMV.
In case it’s relevant to you, I’ll say why I loved NOF:
-
It’s WYSIWYG - just like desktop publishing. You never need to get your hands dirty with HTML unless you’re really pushing the boundaries. That means you spend less time messing about with table formats, alignment coding and CSS and stuff, and more time just putting stuff on the pages. A great timesaver.
-
It’s site-based. What I mean by that is that you structure the pages on a site from within NOF, and it takes care of styles, complete navigation menus, all that, for you. If you want to add a page, you just put it where you want in the site structure and - hey presto! - all the other pages link to it, and it looks like all the other pages, with a blank content area you can start using.
-
You’ve got a goodly amount of site templates and styles to work from. Unless a client insists on a specific set of colours, fonts, etc, you can use pretty much use them as they are, and you’ve got hundreds to choose from. Even if you can only get halfway, you can always edit the styles using the GUI, creating your own. And, since it’s WYSIWYG, your preview is right there in front of you as you type your content.
-
And all this is very easy. I like that. I hate HTML.
-
Oh, and you can upload your pages to the remote host with one click. It remembers which pages have changed since the last upload and ignore others, things like that.
-
Cross-browser. Soon after starting to use NOF all those years ago, I stopped bothering about testing pages in different browsers. It gets them all right. Preview in your favourite browser if you like (remember, it’s WYSIWYG, so you’re already looking at your changes), then publish. I’ve never had a problem.
-
Other stuff I can’t remember off the top of my head.
There are downsides. For one, it’s not an HTML editor (like Dreamweaver), it’s an HTML generator. So, if there’s something you don’t like, that NOF doesn’t allow you to change, you’ve got to hack the code. And there are insert points so, if you do need to work in HTML, you can put it in through the GUI. These are only insert points, I think, so you can’t alter the actual code it generates without hacking it each time you publish. Fine for (say) putting code in for an external page-counter or something.
Another downside is that, like any code-generator (as opposed to code editor), the resultant HTML code is a bit bloated. Not as bad as FrontPage, but not as clean as you’d get with Dreamweaver, which gives you ultimate control at the cost of having to understand HTML pretty profoundly.
Woah - a long post. I’ll shut up now, because your requirements might be (in fact, probably are) quite different from mine. I just like to put content up there quickly and concentrate on the meaning and look - the words and pictures and appearance - rather than on the intricacies of raw HTML.
And a caveat - the last version I used was v5 - they’re up to v10 now, and it’s a recent release, so step wisely even if this sounds like what you’re after. I’m still reading up on user reaction to v10, in case there are major problems introduced. But I still want to buy NOF and start using it again.
Apologies if this isn’t relevant to your needs.
What kind of web site? Do they need interactive content, like shopping carts? Or is it just a static site full of pages?
If I were you, I’d bite the bullet and just use HTML and a good HTML-aware text editor. If you really want to get into the web design business, especially coming from the graphics arts side, you would do well to learn to build web sites using HTML for content, with cascading style sheets (CSS) for your presentation. Sites built this way are much easier to maintain than sites built using tables or generated by 3rd party WYSIWYG editors. And you’ll have complete control over the look of the final product, and build some serious web skills along the way.
Here’s a cool site that shows the same content being rendered with different style sheets: CSS Zen Garden.
If you want to implement shopping carts and the like, your only real choices become using a commercial web design package (or ISP supplied one) that generates the code for you, or learning to write programs in one of the popular web languages.
That’s a pretty poor way to view web design.
I use Homesite. It unfortunately hasn’t been updated in about five years, which is criminal, but I find it to be 1000 times better than all the WYSIWYG apps out there.
(I tried to use Dreamweaver when it first got released, and it was dismal. The worst piece of crap I have ever, in the realm of web design, had the misfortune to try out**. I imagine it’s better now, but I don’t care. Keep me away from it.)
**I’ve never used MS Frontpage.
I’m an HTML purist and have used Homesite and Notepad for many, many years until several clients expressed interest in maintaining the sites I build with Macromedia Contribute. So I went over to the dark side and switched to Dreamweaver.
Mind you, I don’t even bother going to the WYSIWYG part (Design View) of Dreamweaver but their site management tools are good.
Another package I am currently evaluating is Microsoft’s new Expression Web. Looks pretty much like Dreamweaver but of course, with a bias towards ASP. NET.
You should download trials of both.
If you don’t know (X)HTML, you better learn. And get CSS firmly under your belt too. No WYSIWYG editor can give you the control you need with layouting more complex designs.
Do not, do not, do not use a HTML generator like ImageReady or NetObjects Fusion (sorry, Barrington) unless you want to be laughed at by real web designers. Or actually, go ahead. Your project might just end up on my plate 
I am not a purist (web design is not actually part of my job, but I do occasionally have to work up a page or two, either for the web, or some kind of documentation or online help), but I am somewhat familiar with HTML and CSS; I think the WYSIWYG tools can still be quite useful - if, for example, you want to construct a complicated table layout*, it can be helpful to knock it up in the WYSIWYG editor, then crib the code it generates, pretty it up and insert it into your own page.
I’m sure there are people out there who would like nothing better than to sit down and thrash out the thing from scratch in Notepad - and I can do that if I have to - and if that’s what floats your boat, great. I prefer to let a program do it for me.
*Might be a bad example, because for all I know, complicated table layouts may have gone the way of frames.
No apologies necessary, Lush Puppy. Products like NOF suit my purposes - just getting simple but professional-looking sites up and running without having to concentrate too much on anything but the content, which in my case is almost entirely text and images with a nice appearance.
I’ve hand-coded HTML in the past and found it dull, fiddly and irksome. Not that I’m averse to coding - my entire career was spent programming in various languages, and I find the process of coding itself very satisfying. And, at the risk (nay, certainty!) of sounding vain, I was a damned good programmer back in the day.
It’s just that HTML is such a kludgy method of presenting information - I was delighted to find Dreamweaver (back in v3.0), and even more delighted to come across NOF. At last I could concentrate on the content and let the application deal with tables and anchors and transparent GIFs and navbars and all that stuff.
Then again, I would never claim to be a pro web guy. I just stick up stuff on the interweb for fun.
I have NOF, but I really don’t like it - it’s OK if one of the existing templates happens to fit your requirements, but altering them even a little bit seems to very quickly cause the whole project to veer off in a fugly direction.
My best experience of WYSIWYG editors is a program called Namu6 - it’s very restrictive in what it lets you do - for example, you can’t change the font of a bit of text unless you change the template for the whole site - but for amateurs, this is actually a good thing because it enforces simple, clean design. I don’t think I’d recommend it to anyone wanting to work up a business website though.
Thanks for the input.
I’ll be doing the site design as volunteer work for a non-profit academic organization (in addition to my 10,000 other responsibilities), so I’d like to find software that does not require a hefty learning curve and loads of maintenance. I did experiment with writing html back in the late '90s, but really don’t remember anything. The flipside is that as a person with lots of design experience I want the ability to customize the site and not be locked into a dowdy format.
If you have administrative access to the webserver (or someone else in your organisation or under your command does), there are content management systems available that you install on the server and after setting up a design template, you create all the actual content through a web interface - using them to create pages is a bit like, say, listing items for sale on eBay.
Big advantage of this is that you can update the site from anywhere in the world (that can also be a big disadvantage)
It has.
HTML was always meant to be a markup language, not a presentation structure. It’s just that in the old days (a few years ago), we had no choice but to manipulate HTML tables to hold our more complex designs and layouts. The latest W3C standards now separate presentation from content. Enters CSS, stage right, exits nested HTML tables, stage left.
To Jennshark, if it’s just this one job, my vote would go to DW. You can do a split screen with Design view and Code view. If the site is large, it also helps you manage your assets and organize your site. There’s built-in FTP too.
Hi Jenn, art director chiming in. In the various places I’ve worked, Dreamweaver is the standard for web creation work. Since you’re in the design industry, I’d recommend getting your feet wet in this program so you can build on your experience as time goes on, it will be the right thing to have on your resume.
If you can afford it (or can get your work to pay for it), I’d recommend taking a basic course in web design at your local continuing education or art school. I did so and got some helpful insight in common pitfalls. The instructor also volunteered his contact info for technical assistance. If you’re going to be flying solo creating this site for these people, you will want this kind of background and backup.
I used both Dreamweaver and NOF in my webmaster days (about 5 years ago, things have changed since). DW for liquid designs and NOF for rigid designs. Each philosophy has its merits and disadvantages. They are both great programs that get the job done with very little non-sense attached.
As said, NOF is a pain is you have any intention of altering any code by hand. DW is much more flexible in that regard
FWIW…I do believe Adobe/Macromedia allows for 30-day free full trials of their software. Maybe not all titles but Dreamweaver for sure.
DW might be your most expensive choice but I think it might be the smartest. You can go check it out for free and decide in 30 days whether or not to purchase it.
As others have mentioned, there are quite a few programs you can use.
However, the industry standard is still the Adobe Suite (with Illustrator and Photoshop etc.) along with Macromedia’s Dreamweaver (recently purchased by Adobe).
I just finished my coures of study last night (yippee!) at UNLV and received my certificate in Internet Design and Technology. One thing we learned is that although there are many kinds of software on the market that might be just as good, it is still probably better to use industry standard software for many reasons.
-
you might someday leave your positiion and hand over the site to someone else. Most likely, they will know Dreamweaver and the other standard programs and can more easily continue to work on, and update the site, using those programs. Also, as the site grows, more than one person might be working on the site with you - and again, most web designers have experience with Dreamweaver and if you use another software, you might be limiting the number of people able to assist you in the project.
-
end users have different monitors and use different browsers and have different needs - Dreamweaver has some very easy features to help make your site accessible to all those various end users. I am sure other software has similar features, but Dreamweaver is also considered an industry standard by IE and Firefox, so even they have adapted to some of the features of DW.
Years ago there used to be the old adage, “no one ever got fired for buying IBM” which implied that, although IBM products might not have been the cheapest, they were never shoddy. Granted, there are lots of other products on the market now that are as good, if not far better than IBM - but the same holds true. At this point, Dreamweaver and the other Adobe products are safe bets - and if nothing else, you can always find a gazillion people able to jump in and help you should you find yourself stumped on a phase of the project. Don’t know if that will be the case if you use some of the other software.
Just my 2 cents.
Sorry for the delay on this.
I guess if you don’t know, then you probably are not working in that aspect of the technology or perhaps it has not been selected yet.
I used Dreamweaver myself a few years back. It was an impressive tool then - probably better now. Dreamweaver was a good balance of IDE and quick change to different platforms. That is why I dropped the dollars for it then. I sued it for HTML, ASP, ASP.NET, VB.NET, and some PHP. It had good plugins available that helped make some of the development, integration, and site management issues easier to handle.
There are some other alternatives which might be more powerful if you need to get more into the java realm - Oracle offers JDeveloper (for free) and there is Eclipse (a widely used, free opensource tool). If you end up heading to java, I would definitely give either of these a look. Dreamweaver starts to lose its appeal when you enter this area (in my opinion). JDeveloper has an advantage in that it is supported and used by the vendor (Oracle). Eclipse is well maintained so far through the opensource community. Either are a viable tool.
Best of luck.