Does anyone know of a good software package for website design. I mean something reasonably quick to learn and use with good results. I suppose I might be looking for the holy grail, but if any of you guys with website experience would like to chip in it would be appreciated.
Forget Frontpage... it's only just catching up to dreamweaver... and Dreamweaver is over-rated too... It doesnt produce very good code either. If you just use DW as an editor of sorts you'll be OK. But the WYSIWYG features of DW and other similar packages are a pain. Dont use them... Learn HTML, Learn CSS then use an edit like HTML-Kit (free) ...
Eh, Dreamweaver MX makes pretty awesome pages with WYSIWYG. Well at least for me, but I sort of half overlook the code and do work in it at the same time. I just use WYSIWYG for the main layout.
i agree with cjmwork2, learning xhtml / css will not only produce standards complient code but you will also understand what dreamweaver and the likes actually do. It also means should you need to you can manually edit the html...
Thanks for the help, fairly balanced either way, dreamweaver or coding. Anyone else out there used Dreamweaver?
Dreamweaver all the way. Frontpage is a POS useful only for knocking up a page in under 2 mins for something like an ebay auction. If you need a decent webpage which will be maintained for longer than 1 week you need something better than Frontpage.
Another vote for DWMX, but its expensive. HomeSite is also made by macromedia, but there is no WYSIWYG functionallity (I don't really use it anyway) and has the same code finishing functionality (at least the last version I used did). I checked out Nvu the other day, it looks promising, but not all there yet. Of course you could always use good ole Arachnophilia, an older version, I don't really like the newer Java version of it. Later
Another vote for using a text editor and w3schools.org. In the time it'll take you to get to grips with dreamweaver and tidy the code you could be up to speed with XHTML and CSS/2 and in the process be producing better, compliant scrips.
Agreed on both points. Advantage over the basic text editor is simple syntax checking, gets inserted image size automatically and 1-click preview in a choice of browsers. Leave Notepad for the weirdos and Dreamweaver for the pirates. http://www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia/index_old.html
I'm sitting on the fence between dreamweaver and notepad + photoshop 7. Learning the actual code behind it has its advantages, but if you want an easy job then just go with the WYSIWYG editor.
I think people are confusing web design with editing a file. Notepad is great for editing a file, but has a few downsides when considering web design/development as a whole. You can use the wysiwyg to editor to design pages with sloppy (yet 100% validated) code. Some guys from the W3C worked with them on the latest version to improve standards compliancy. I use dreamweaver roughly 5 hours a day, with about 30 minutes total spent in the "design view" (or wysiwyg mode) and the other 4.5 hours in code view. Imagine if notepad had an insanely simple FTP client built in, color coded your text for you, checked for w3c Validation, for browser issues, and even had code tips to guide you as you learned scripting languages, html, and CSS. Also imagine they are all optional, so you only use what you want. That's Dreamweaver MX 2004. (it also has some added "features" that I would never use, but the base program is definitely worth it) I would prefer an open source version, but edit pad, text pad, screem, quanta, etc. etc. never come close to what dreamweaver does. If you've found an editor that makes web development easier while still writing all the code by hand, let me know and I'll switch in a heartbeat. (btw, Dreamweaver <=4 was horrible, MX okay, and MX 2004 great)
Thanks again for all the input. Agreed the downside of dreamweaver could be cost, I have heard its expensive. But its good to hear from actual users and get the feedback, so I might bite the bullet on cost and go for it.Having said all of that does anyone know about the ease or difficulty of maintenance with it?
Student editions should be cheaper, and if you go to a university, you may be able to get it very cheap or free, depending on what kind of school it is.
For web page development in the past I have always used TextPad with the syntax libraries for HTML, JSP, etc. Then at least the code is color coded like a real ide. I just went out and got the 30 day trial version of Dreamweaver MX 2004. It seems pretty cool. I'm gonna play around with it some more. But at work, doing real world web development, I use either Websphere Application Developer or IntelliJ Idea. Of course I'm mainly writing straight Java with a few JSPs thrown in for good measure. But TextPad can be set up to do quite a few nifty little things for you. You can set it up to compile your Java code for you...well it calls the compiler from TextPad. But you can't get it to validate your code...at least not that I've found yet.
If you're pragmatic then you'll use *any* tool to blat out the initial design (yes even Frontpage if you have to!) You'll then spend *real development time* tidying up the automated code and doing browser compatible stuff in tools that dont mess up or alter your code. Personally I dont care for WYSIWYG editors and stuff ... and they tend to be dependant on their internal browser engine. Better to use a tool your happy with and download a couple of browsers ... e.g. Firefox, Netscape 6 & 7, and IE. Should cover the majority of stuff out there Stu
Not in the UK, unless the university has a site license (which I really doubt) they will require a licence per install. (I work in IT support for a uni so know this) OneSeventeen basically described what I do aswell. Design the page in design mode then cutinto code view and tweak it to what you want.
used to use vim wich is great as it has far better autocompletion than dreamweaver. But started to use dreamweaver more now as the ftp tools make working on a project far easyer.
