Thread: DreamWeaver vs FrontPage

Here are some thoughts from someone who has been in web development for several years and has taught college courses using both FrontPage and Dreamwearer. When you are just beginning a visual editor is ok to use but if you want a professional looking site learn to code with notepad or notetab (my favorite). Another option is Nvu, an open source editor, which is giving FrontPage and Dreamweaver something to worry about. Keep the design simple and keep a consistent look and feel throughout the site. A little knowledge of PHP can go a long way in making a web site interactive. Dreamweaver uses a proprietary method for creating a master template that is used for all your pages. You can obtain the same result with css and a few basic PHP commands and it's not proprietary. The best web site for web development is http://alistapart.com

Here is a demo I set up for oper-realty ver 2a. It is still in alpha and not everything is working.

Nvu is a neat little editor and it

Originally Posted by HHI Golf Guy

Thanks for the compliment

Have you taken a look at Open Realty to manage listings?

I downloaded it because I was interested to see how their programming worked. It's an MySQL / PHP based application, and it looks decent. With a little understanding of PHP, it looks highly customizable.

Thanks for the link. This is something I am looking into and so will take a look at this code. I have not done much in PHP but have 35 years experience in other languages. PHP seems fairly easy to understand and I have easly been able to modify some other simple scripts to suit my simple purposes.
Plus it is free!

M$ Frontpage might be ok if you are on a M$ server but it puts in all kinds of un-needed code into the html that can cause pages to not display well in other non M$ browsers. I used it several years ago to create some personal web pages and some of the templates and navigational wizards were helpfull. After creating the site I then went into the html code to add a few of my own bell and whistles and clean up the code, BUT every time I reopened the pages in M$ Frontpage it completly undid all the cleaning up I had done and moved code where I did not want it to be!

This is a problem with most WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors

I went to a seminar put on by Macromedia, the Dreamweaver guys and it looked pretty powerful and they gave me beta versions of the full suite. But at that time I did not have the operating system required to load it , now I do but don't know where the darn CD's are.

I now will use a simple WYSIWYG html designer to just come up with the simple layout (templet if you want to call it that) to format my pages and then just edit the html to do what I want. And I NEVER open the pages in the WYSIWYG designer again as I got tired of them making the page and code look like they want instead of how I want. Currently I am using HTML-Kit for editing the html code, it is free and seems helpful, especialy in making sure the html code is valid.

Just My Humble Opinion

I always suggest running your pages through the W3C Validator. Not only will it show you what needs to be cleaned up, but in the long run your HTML skills will improve.

For those using CSS, there is also a CSS Validator.