I'm playing with an evaluation copy of Dreamweaver, and need to make a recommendation to my company about whether to buy a license or stick with Frontpage.

One of the things that makes me miserable in Frontpage is the way it suddenly craps out on you when you make the slightest "five-minute" change to a table. Suddenly the whole page goes haywire, and you spend a good three hours putting things back to rights, usually ending up modifying the HTML code directly because the interface doesn't know what it's doing.

I haven't had time to encounter the indiosyncracies of Dreamweaver. Are they as frustrating as Frontpage's? Or is Dreamweaver better? And why?

FrontPage spits out dirty code.


Dreamweaver is an industry standard and codes A LOT cleaner than FP. If you company has the budget for Dreamweaver, I highly recommend purchasing the license.


-Ron

While I strongly prefer hand coding over any WYSIWYG editor, if you're going to use one DreamWeaver is really the best of the lot. Far, far better than FrontPage. There will be a learning code as with any new program, but I think your company will find it's worth it to make the switch.

I actually have both editors. FrontPage and Dreamweaver v.8.

What I'd like to say here is, before you decide on which editor to use. Write on a piece of paper this points:

• what is your skill in html coding
• what kind of websites will you be creating

Some of you more experienced might wanna add more. I say this because of the steep difference in price between the 2 editors. One comes free with Win XP while the other is expensive.

I've been creating web pages since '94-'95. My favourite used to be Homesite, been using it since v.1....but nowadays I use Frontpage.

Dreamweaver may have a whole lot of extra things but with that comes a very steep learning curve. You can't expect to be able to create a website from when you slip the CD in. There's so many "gadgets" that most of the time you'll end up getting lost and spending more time trying to figure things out.


FrontPage on the other hand, if you are familiar with basic coding, you can turn it on and begin creating webpages right away. It even has quite a few nifty features.

If you plan on getting Dreamweaver then you must plan some time to really sit down and study the features. Only then will it be of great use and benefit to you. Otherwise you might as well be using FrontPage.

Overall, in my personal opinion, I'd rather use Frontpage. Fast, easy and no hassles. Oh, if you liked FrontPage then you would definitely LOVE HomeSite it's like FrontPage but only 100x better. Another advantage is that you can integrate it with Dreamweaver and it also has a handy, pretty useful CSS Editor as well.

You might also wanna take a look at some other editors out there. ATM I am just about gonna start on a new editor called Antenna by Tormdance.net.

Looks promising but I havent tried it yet what with being to bz with work and such.

I like trying out new softwares and check out their features. It's cheap for me because in Malaysia softwares like these costs bout $10-$20 bucks because of the piracy. I done condone using pirated stuff by the way. If I like a particular software I will usually purchase it online, that is, after I have tried out the pirated version first. That way I don't lose my hard earned money

I haven't used Frontpage since probably 02 so I'm not up on all the knew features. However the moment I stopped using Frontpage I went straight to Dreamweaver 4. FP I found was easier to the webmaster to be, most the buttons were intuative etc. However when I started becoming experienced I found DW to be a far better suite. Especially if you end up hand coding html, php, javascript, etc DW color codes all syntax and offers code hints with CSS. I hardly use all the features in DreamWeaver, but as far as WYSIWYG go it is the most advance and easiest to use. My only complaint with DW is unloading an entire site is a slow bitter process, thats why I found Filezilla for that problem.

DW does take a bit of change. Honestly now that I think of it DW is better to start with because of the color syntax and code hints.

There will be a learning curve with DreamWeaver as is true of most software. Like I mentioned above I hand code sites and only have limited experience with WYSIWYG editors. Most of what I can tell about them is from looking over the code of sites developed with each.

While it's far from perfect DreamWeaver does produce better code than FrontPgae and once you get up to speed with using it I think you'll apreciate it more and find it more useful than FrontPage.

I use frontpage 2003, and there might be alot of stuff that I cannot do, but for now it gets me in the website door.

I would reccomend it if your starting out, but I also think that if you can learn html, then thats far better

I think that for anyone who wants to create quality websites learning html is a must. I know many professionals use a WYIWYG editor, but most professionals also know enough html to go into the code and fix things when they need.

Now if you're not looking to become a professional web designer/developer then WYSIWYG ediors might be all you need to create websites. I do think Dreamweaver is the best of the lot, but I agree with those here who say FrontPage will have the shallowest learning curve and it will be the easiest to begin using right away.

I started by website business four years ago and spent approximately a month beta testing both Front Page and Dreamweaver.

In my opinion Dreamweaver was much easier to use - even from day one - and I was not a coder at the time.

I purchased Dreamweaver and over the next few months also purchased two or three HTML books (The complete reference is best in my opinion).

No comparison - - Dreamweaver is a much more powerful suite and allows me to produce great websites with no extranous code.

Since then I have been hired to 're-engineer' multiple existing websites and find that if I want to update a site that was previously designed using Front Page it is much easier and quicker for me to just trash the old site and start over than to try to reuse any of the the existing Front Page code.

I have Dreamweaver and FrontPage (it comes with office xp after all). Now FrontPage is actually pretty useful for spell checking. I really like the way it works as Microsoft Word and highlights errors right away. But in Dreamweaver you'd need to do the spell checking. Then when it comes to code when I used to make crappy designs I loved FrontPage. But as I learned more, wanted faster results, and got into Photoshop I found it works great with Dreamweaver. In FrontPage it does work but doesn't produce W3C standard codes. In my opinion if you are not a serious designer then Dreamweaver isn't for you. Both FrontPage and Dreamweaver are great but it depends on how fast you want to work. In FrontPage you can generate the crappy codes and standardize them by editing manually. Where in Dreamweaver it does in a snap and points out where exactly the problem is . Bottom like Dreamweaver is more useful than FrontPage.

I've been using FrontPage for a couple of years but have only done several web sites for my personal use. I have to admit it's faily easy to use and works for me. I've had no complaints with my targeted audiance, amateur astronomers. That siad, I don't use a lot of fancy features which is where I think most problems occur with cross broswers. I've wanted to get into DW but find it very confusing. Maybe being pointed to a good 3rd party book is required.

Steve

Originally Posted by sreilly

.... Maybe being pointed to a good 3rd party book is required.

Steve

I have two that I bought to get up 'up to speed' on the software - 'Dreamweaver MX 2004 Bible' and 'The missing manual - Dreamweaver MX 2004'.

Normally when I purchase one of these books I actually read it front to back and do all the exercises (takes about a week). After these two books I seldom need to use them now - - everything seem to be completely intuitive.

JJ

Dreamweaver:
+ Fully XHTML and CSS2 compliant code and support
+ Inhouse manuals, snippets and references
+ Built-in FTP client with check-in and check-out support so your colleagues won't work on a file you're currently working on
+ Built-in html and css and browser validator
+ Excellent, top-of-the-line source format coloring
+ PHP and MySQL generators for easy adding, editing and deleting dbase contents
+ Fast, clean and easy to learn interface
+ Totally adaptable with cool extensions
+ Source code fast tags, you'll never have to close your HTML tag, it will recognize it and close it itself
+ PHP tooltip support for functions etc etc etc
+ ASP, ColdFusion, HTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript, JAVA, JSP etc etc support
+ The standard in IDE's.
+ 1000s of other functions I've never used before

- Crashes sometimes, just out of the blue.
- Can't handle advanced PHP structures
- Can't think of more?


Frontpage:
+ boots fast
+ built-in FTP client
+ easy to learn WYSIWYG
+ copy/paste from Word, excel etc
+ Access dbase support

- Crappy source output
- Can't handle PHP output within HTML
- very bad looking inhouse buttons, styles, framespages etc etc
- never heard of a doctype

I'd say buy that Dreamweaver license... Especially since Macromedia is now Adobe, I bet great things will be developed in the nearby feature! For example, check out Macromedia Flex! Amazing stuff.

Personally I hate FrontPage, because of crappy output code, complicated to use (compared to hand-coding, my favourite techique), and it's Microsoft. The only sensible thing from Microsoft is Word and Excel, and they're much better on Mac than on Windows. (I know because I've tried).

I only use frontpage 2003, and I like it becuase i am new.

But I have now switched to css, and it is way worth the time to learn it

I mean with frontpage you can see what your doing while your doing it, but it really leaves some "dirty" code.

I think dreamweaver may be cleaner, but like Van Gogh stated, hand coding is better

I'm sure Dreamweaver would be a better option. For quickies use Go Daddy.

Ciao!