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I want FP but without all the head aches !
anyone..?
Thanks..
My site grew to the point it was hard to check for broken links, orphaned image files, missing titles, meta tags, alt tags, etc. etc. The kind of stuff I screw up when I work waaay to late ;)
So I purchased DW4 for the WYSIWYG ease, easy to use templates and libraries for updating/changing common sections site wide and because DW can help manage a site by checking for broken links, orphans, etc. I love the "Notes" feature because I often think of something when I haven't the time to do it.
I now use a combination of DW and NoteTab Pro and wouldn't be without NotTab open almost all of time because of the other great features, non related to web design, that it offers!
<disclaimer>I'm not a full time web designer. My web site is to offer my "real" work to the web. I just do my own site and a couple for friends.</disclaimer>
Remember though that the FP of 5 years ago is not the FP od today. FP200 and onwards produces clean code.
Imagine if we said "I dated five years ago but s/he was a real dork - Ugh! - so I havn't dated since."
Onya
Woz
However, what I meant to say, and didn't articulate very well, was that I really like the combination of Dreamweaver (for all its goodies) and NoteTab Pro for hand coding.
Tried Hotmetal Pro 5.0 that was enough thanks.
Jamsy,
Agreed, which ever browser you use, if your happy with it why change, as long as the code validates, and the functionality is good-enough then who cares. As with hot metal, to me it seemed hard work.
Na, Dreamweaver Rocks!
I've liked DW quite well for a WYSIWYG editor. I may edit the code fairly often, but building complex tables (and keeping track of the COLSPANs and ROWSPANs) is a real pain in a text editor.
The newest version of FP seems a bit snappier, but I haven't had a chance to evaluate it in depth.
I started playing with an early version of HotMetal first, a few years ago then played with a couple of others later till I bought HMP6 which seems great for most things.
Its a small irritant that they are not supporting it now with updates for example some javascript modules have not been updated etc it seems Softquad are focussing more on xml products now and have given up competing with DW for wysiwyg editors.
I use it mainly to make / tweak template pages which I populate with other things. The image editing it came with was good though. Another non industry standard item, Ulead Photoimpact rather than Adobe.
Fine for Web sized stuff but I gather that if I point it at 100 x 20mb tiff images it might get a bit busy!
I think the problems historically have included difficulty of collaboration with other designers on the same site...
That may be true if you're using FP-specific features and the other designers aren't using FP. Of course, that problem isn't unique to FrontPage. Content management systems are even worse. (I've written for several clients with content management systems that required chopping an article into pieces and entering the headlines, subheads, body text, etc. into e-forms.)
intolerance of changes made outside FP
That hasn't been true in years.
the funky Shared Borders vs. multiple templates like DW offers
Funky? They work great on my site.
tedious publishing process
Tedious? Click "Publish," and it publishes. That's pretty simple. If you have more than a few hundred pages within a given Web it takes longer, but then you can simply upload individual files via ftp if you want. No big deal. (FWIW, if you have a really large site, you'll probably want to divide it into subwebs anyway for organizational reasons.)
and frequent site corruption requiring publishing from the remote site back to the local hard drive.
Are you sure you don't have an OS or hard-drive problem? FP doesn't corrupt my site, and I use it nearly every day unless I'm traveling.
The best one is Homesite. Using it for years now, you won't find any better.
Homesite is an HTML editor, not a WYSIWYG authoring tool. It's really a whole different animal from FrontPage or Dreamweaver.
I'm a FrontPage user myself, but I do find Homesite to be a wonderful tool for one task: extended search-and-replace operations. If I want to change a block of code on 500 or more pages in one fell swoop, it's a lot more convenient to do it in Homesite than in FrontPage.
Homesite is an HTML editor, not a WYSIWYG authoring tool.
I know but doesn't the thread topic say WYSIWYG and Text Code Editors?
;)
I know but doesn't the thread topic say WYSIWYG and Text Code Editors?
The title says WYSIWYG, I guess we have to split a hair when some people will be comfortable with a pure WYSIWYG environment while others like to work "closer to the code" so to speak :)
that's weird... well... it's late, you know ;)
oops, I took the forum name and thought it would be the thread name
that's weird... well... it's late, you know
Well, when it's late and your eyes are tired, WYS isn't always WYG. :-)
I've been using FP and have a very successful site with some Swish animation, etc. Took a while to learn FP to its fullest potential.
Now, I'm faced with needing 1st class PHP integration and have been playing with the DWmx trial. I also bought a DW beginnner book.
I have no doubt, after looking at both, that DW is the better program with more potential for building complex sites. But, I still don't know if the learing curve is worth abandoning FP for DW. It's like learning French and having to move to Spain and start a new language.
Any thoughts on the DW learning curve? It looks very steep when you are used to FP and just starting to evaluate.
I use Dreamweaver 4 and absolutely love it. I didn't use a book or anything to learn it - just playing around with it for a couple of days allows you to quickly figure out most of it. Obviously, if you're doing ASP or CFM, a book is likely needed, but for straight HTML, Dreamweaver is really hard to beat. The extensions for it are also dynamite as is the very tight integration between Fireworks and Dreamweaver (especially for me since I have a graphics/photo heavy site).
Using Dreamweaver, despite knowing nothing about HTML, I designed a 1500 page site that visitors really, really like. Admittedly, I haven't tested it in all the browsers, so maybe there is quirks in places such as Netscape 3 and Opera. But who uses these browsers, anyway?
My two cents worth.
Jim
Here's my $0.02.
Typically, I do 90% of my coding by hand with my trusty GWD Text Editor. Occassionally, however, I'll want to flush out the rough layout of a table or a page in a WYSIWYG editor before tweaking it in GWD.
In the past, I've used FrontPage. First FP Express, then later FP 2000.
What I like about Frontpage is:
Here's what I like:
Hope this "unbiased" viewpoint helps.
Well, lots of people do. And more for Opera than you might think as in many cases it is set up to identify itself as MSIE in order to stop those annoying warnings saying 'You need IE4 or NN 4' etc.
In any case, Dreamweaver output works fine in Opera and if you're going to use a WYSIWYG editor then it's the best there is.
I started out learning about web design using (ugh!) Netscape Composer. Great for beginners, but fairly primitive. I shifted to hand-coding 'cause it was less expensive and I really felt it was important to learn HTML for its own sake.
When I got tired of correcting 57,000 typos per page (yeah, I like to exaggerate sometimes) for stupid little things like missing a closing tag (especially on a table), I switched to DreamWeaver. Why? Simple. I prefer Netscape for my default browser. When I would surf to websites designed in FP, they rarely showed up properly in NN and often times the only way I could view them at all was to switch browsers to IE (which I hated).
Unlike FP, DreamWeaver doesn't use any proprietary codes when it sets up your webpage. Now, I know there are lots of folks out there who use FP with no problems. They've found all the ins and outs of setting their preferences so their paegs show up properly in NN and other browsers. I'm sure I've browsed some of their pages in NN without ever even realizing it. I've never checked the code of a page that I couldn't view in NN and discovered it was designed DW.
For my money, I'd point anyone looking for a good WYSIWYG editor to DreamWeaver. Then I'd tell 'em to download a copy of TextPad so they can hand-code whatever DW won't do for them on its own, or so they can add whatever weirdness they'd like for their favorite proprietary browsers.
As for those of you who code everything by hand. More power to you. However, I have a small child and need as much time as I can get to do things other than type each and every table-tr-td and its respective closing tag by hand.
WYSIWYG programs are a time-saver. It's just that simple.
<editted for typos>
It also happens to be damn good editor too with loads of extra bits like case transposition and notification of changes to your files by background processes.
I've never checked the code of a page that I couldn't view in NN and discovered it was designed DW.
I can send you some of mine, Syren! :) (NN4.x chokes on lots of stuff, including most CSS. Below 3% and falling, thank goodness!)
As a previous FP user, I can attest that DW is a bit intimidating when you boot it for the first time. It's probably all those little windows, and the fairly cryptic toolbar. Once you get into it, though, you won't get back. It's not really too bad - a day or two of use will get you the basics.
Like most good programs, you need a good book and read up.
If you know Photoshop the process is smooth.
My .02. ;)
My favorite is FrontPage 2002, which works well for my site (more than 3,000 pages, plain-vanilla page design, editorial focus). If I were running a very design-intensive site, I might feel differently.
BTW, there's no need to "clean up" after FP2002.
If you use IE maybe, but on other browsers so much of the code is redundant it's just filling up bandwidth ...
I can send you some of mine, Syren! :) (NN4.x chokes on lots of stuff, including most CSS. Below 3% and falling, thank goodness!)
Thanks, rogerd, but I never said NN4.x didn't choke on stuff. NN4.x chokes on lots of stuff - pages I've done, as well as other folks'.
But of the pages I couldn't view at all in NN4.x, none of 'em were created in DW. ;)
I've been told it was because the FP pages were designed by amateurs. Of course, DW doesn't care if you're an amateur or not. It just goes merrily along creating pages that can be viewed in pretty much any ol' browser. The pages may look a little funny in some of the older browsers, but you can still see the content of 'em.
That's definitely an argument in favor of DW over FP. Even for amateurs! ;)
If you use IE maybe, but on other browsers so much of the code is redundant it's just filling up bandwidth ...
That may have been true with old versions of FP. Of course, most of the complaints about at FP are from people who haven't used it since FP98 or earlier. In the interests of fairness, maybe I should post a series of my complaints about Dreamweaver 2.0 here and omit the "2.0" in my post. :-)
As far as the "filling up bandwidth" argument, the most sensible response is: "Even if that were true, so what?" On most of today's Web pages, graphics (and, in many cases, JavaScript) consume far more bandwidth than HTML code does. The key to fast-loading pages is good design, not trying to eliminate a handful of unneeded font tags or whatever from the HTML code.
