Pros and Cons of website design apps...

[seattleslk]

Newb here .... I wanted to ask what you folks here use for website design tools. I've been checking out Dreamweaver, GoLive and FrontPage.

Could any webmaster guru types give pros/cons of the above applications??

Thanks much!!

SSLK.

[Gism0]

pros: they are easy to use and visual

cons: they usually generate stupid code which doesn't work with all browsers and is needlessly complicated, a common thing is to see a page which has had the font declared on every line, like:

<p><font face="verdana, ariel, sans-serif" size="2">line one</font</p>

<p><font face="verdana, ariel, sans-serif" size="2">line two</font</p>

<p><font face="verdana, ariel, sans-serif" size="2">line three</font</p>

<p><font face="verdana, ariel, sans-serif" size="2">line four</font</p>

though dreamweaver is getting a better with the ole CSS, it's still not as powerfull as just learning how to use html and css and doing it in a simple text editor (imo)

edit: if you are going to use anything, use Dreamweaver.

[SMELVIN]

best to stick to one and keep banging your head againest the wall till something clicks.. but i agree with Gismo DREAMWEAVER. or like any one else who started like i did year zero with good old notepad!!! homesite if your a geek like me?

[DarkPhoenix]

they usually generate stupid code which doesn't work with all browsers and is needlessly complicated, a common thing is to see a page which has had the font declared on every line, like:

<p><font face="verdana, ariel, sans-serif" size="2">line one</font</p>

<p><font face="verdana, ariel, sans-serif" size="2">line two</font</p>

<p><font face="verdana, ariel, sans-serif" size="2">line three</font</p>

<p><font face="verdana, ariel, sans-serif" size="2">line four</font</p>

Not to mention that the <font> tag is by definition not HTML at all.

Anyway, I use Dreamweaver, though I work basically only in source-code mode, so I could might as well be using Notepad... it's just that Dreamweaver has some nice features, like source-code coloring and the like.

And.. for the love of all that is nice... please refrain from using FrontPage at any cost. It's the sewage of WYSIWYG applications.

[neosapience]

You could try something like Webcoder. It's an HTML editor that wont do anything you don't tell it to. It's fairly easy to learn and it sure beats using Notepad.

[MadGutts]

Notepad Rules !

But Dreamweaver is very good, and fairly easy to use....

[seattleslk]

Thank you all for the input. I'm going to go with Dreamweaver and the 2004 MX suite with Flash and Fireworks. I've been told GoLive can be a bit of a pain to learn.

[peachy]

Dreamweaver MX 2004 is a good choice! It handles CSS better than anything out there and its WYSIWYG mode does faithfully render CSS properly 95% of the time. The nice thing about DWMX2004 is that if you use style sheets then the font rules in your style sheet are added to your menu for styling your text. That in itself makes developing pages less of a chore.

The other neat feature of DWMX2004 is much appreciated by web application developers. It has built-in tools to add PHP, ColdFusion Markup Language, and ASP tags. It also has a library of basic scripts for using those scripting languages to interface with databases. I taught a web server technology course last fall and I showed the students how to quickly create queries and display output using DWMX2004 and a ColdFusion server.

[matrix0978]

Notepad 100%!!!!! nothing better.Well maybe PHP because its so much easier... Just upload and ur done lol. Thats the lazy way.*wink wink* Me