An easier way then HTML?

Hi Tall Miky, rather than get into a discussion about this tool being better than that tool...if you are running a business and you want professional results and a minimum of pain then... in my humble opinion you can use BOTH of wordpress and Joomla.

Most of the free wordpress templates are so so but you can buy and modify some premium wordpress themes very easily and get great professional results. In addition therea re a ton of great freelancers who can really polish up a nice WP theme real quickly.

Joomla is the same except it is much more powerful and once you get the hang of it can really pay dividends.

Both Joomla and Wodpress allow you to tweak for SEO so you can alter title tags and meta tags with ease. Joomla allows you to cange the URL structure quickly to make them search friendly and with Joomla there are a ton of good components that allow you to do the same.

The only problem with Joomla is that many of the template designers seem to think that more is better and they put way to much content into the themes when less would be better...you've seen the sites with polls, content boxes, articles, images charts and god knows what else on the home page.

Both of these can get you great professional results...one thing though..if you yourself are not the creative designer...then find someone who is..don't bust your chops trying to make something professional looking if you don't have a design bone in your body...a lesson I learned early on.
Cheers

Ed

 

I must admit I have to laugh at all the people who pretend they actually know enough to comment about Dreamweaver and how it's not a pro tool.

It's quite obvious that these "pro's" as they like to call themselves are blissfully unaware of what Dreamweaver actually is.

For those who aren't aware, Dreamweaver has a code view you know. It also does syntax highlighting, has code snippets, has an awesome site manager (Dreamweavers killer app imo) that understands development and production servers, has code check in/check out, built in css editor, code formatter and beautifier and hundreds of other invaluable tools which make it the finest web design package available.

The wysiwig editor is about 1% of what Dreamweaver is about. I've tried just about every web design package available, and even the best such as CODA fall well short of Deamweaver. I would say 100% of web design professionals that use Dreamweaver use it in code view and wouldn't swap it for anything else.

Please, stop treating Dreamweaver as a simple wysiwyg editor. IT ISN'T!!!!

 

Maybe Dreamweaver is Wysiwyg mode (design view/beginners mode

 

Fair enough, Gyrotive. Dreamweaver has received it's fair share of unjustified critique throughout the years. But by your own argument, the code view is also 1% of what the software is about. And this makes sense because; Dreamweaver, at least the one I know, is far too bloated with "functionality" aimed at beginners to be considered a pro tool. Don't freak out because CODA's question lazy Dreamweavers (please excuse the pun). I would give it another go, but package-products are (close to) never as good as more specialized counterparts.

 

It's true, I am blissfully unaware of what Dreamweaver does. LOL - Code beautifier? I just use a text editor (Ultraedit) and the Firefox HTML validator plugin, and my code comes out downright sexy, let alone beautiful.

 

DREAMWEAVER...and its not hard to become an "html pro" if you wanna call it that...html is one of the easiest coding languages ever!!!!!

No time at all

 

Why? I found it to be seriously lacking if one wants control of output and high productivity.

Most of us have wandered through the Dreamweaver world, have found its features to be weak.

That's called a text editor. An awfully expensive text editor. But maybe it also supports 70 or 80 other languages, including integrated compilation, &c.? My text editor does.

Huh? Are you talking about javascript? DW's javascript bits are terribly obtrusive, bloated and far from best practice.

I don't know all that much about DW on this front, but I can edit directories, ssh, scp, ftp, move and copy files and run any utility right in my editor.

Still an expensive editor isn't it? My editor directly integrates with the three major cvs applications, css is just text, and Tidy runs in my editor and is compatible with my editor's point position. And there is on the fly xhtml/xml validation.

No, it's not. But, it doesn't offer anything a good text editor doesn't. Further, any GUI based applications is inherently slower and less productive to use than a purely text based application.

Does DW run on Mac, or is it purely Windows? How is that for portability if your senior programmers are running Linux? Are you tying content management to DW? Vendor lock in has a long term negative effect.

No thanks. I'll stick with Emacs at a price of $0.00 and enjoy the complete cross platform compatibility and high productivity.

I'll give you credit for at least trying to support your choice with reasonable arguments. It's just that your experience is limited, or you'd know that DW offers nothing a good editor doesn't and does it at a high price.

cheers,

gary

 

dude you are INSANE uhhh gary... ahahhaa WOW

 

..huh? try grammer or something...

 

Lawlz, well said, Gary. But... teh kitchen sink.. : )

I'll go with what most people are saying as far as the OP-- if you want a professional website, you need a professional to make it... now I started out knowing nothing, not even HTML tables, and within about 6 months I could hold my own with various designs... I would say, if you're sure this webpage will be dynamic and changing over the weeks and months, that it IS worth at least one of you guys to go ahead and learn proper HTML and CSS. HTML can be learned in like a week or less, though I am still learning new stuff with HTML even now, a year after I started... CSS takes much longer, but is totally worth it.
This way, with not as much time/resources spent as you're imagining, you can have your pro website AND the ability to change as needed... learning website building isn't like learning to program the Mars Rover in Perl or anything. It IS worth at least one of your guy's time to learn this.

With a template, I'm sorry but no matter how good a template is written it is always BLOATED and difficult to work with, simply because they write those things with maximum flexibility... you'll find half a css sheet (or multiple css sheets!) for things not even in your HTML. You'll find CSS grouped in non-intuitive ways, making it difficult to see who's interacting and overriding and influencing who. Templates are good when you just want a site and DON'T want to ever change it, EVER. Because when you do, you will lose your hair. A lot of it. By pulling it out.

Joomla is indeed quite powerful, but Drupal moreso... but takes more time to learn. If you bother with one of these CMS's then you're tying yourself to that one system which may reduce your flexibility. On the other hand, they do come with lots of scripts and if your site needs to be truly dynamic (working with clients, dealing with forms, commenting systems...) then that may be what you need as, while learning HTML and CSS isn't all that hard, adding on a scripting langauge (Javascript) and a server-side language (Perl, Python, PHP, plus the MySQL side of things), and the learning curve just got steeper.

 

You sound like one of those Vi fangurlz. Besides, except for the syntax hi-liting and the xml validation, and those are modules, none of those features are built in; Emacs lets you run your choice of utilities from within the editor.

@ OP: Stomme poes is right about one thing (her attitude toward the world's most powerful, wonderful and productive editor notwithstanding ), you need to learn at least the basics. One of you needs to act as the company's webmaster. That requires a broad base of knowledge vis à vis web development. Even if you contract an outsider for the post, you have to know enough to oversee your agent.

cheers,

gary

 

Excellent post, Gary - well put and well said!

 

...16 posts? who are you?

 

Nope, not one of us has ever opened Dreamweaver, when some of us have been in the business for 10 years or more.</sarcasm>

Pretty much everyone here has used Dreamweaver to some degree at some point, many of us started out with it, I have it installed on my computer. And it sucks. It has a decent code view and FTP client, but so does Notepad++. The only thing I've seen so far that (thankfully) Notepad++ doesn't have is autoclose.

 

I actually know that... I used Dreamweaver at some point but Dreamweaver uses too much resources for things that I don't actually use.