I suppose Word97 is passe? How about... how about Netscape Composer?! :O))) I've got to say that at lest learn to make your html,head,body tags, and a few paragraphs + h1 and h2, in notepad. That basic foundation will get you miles ahead when trying to learn DW right away.
True, although syntax highlighting is a godsend and I don't know anyone that has the balls to call that cheating ;-). Of course learning the basic structure of an HTML page has you suggest will have additional benefits once HTML has been learnt and the student moves on to CSS... - Jamie
I've been away a while, however I have some (now old) news that applies to this topic. Macromedia has been acquired by Adobe, making the Studio products much much better. Since you will now be able to intergrate Photoshop into Dreamweaver and other stuff like that, Dreamweaver is now the 100% best choice. For all practical purposes, Frontpage has become obsolete.
hah! frontpage was never worth a damn, it alloud the world to quickly get filled with a bunch of little kides whom called themselves "web designers" ...front page... hah!
I use Frontpage and am going to have to change to Dreamweaver. It is impossible to validate my pages designed in FP. Pain in the ass because i'm so familiar with FP it's going to be like learning to walk again.
I used Frontpage for a day and decided that there must be something better out there, and there was. Dreamweaver
You can get the DW8 free 30 day trial here. I managed to upgrade from Studio4 for a decent price, but work paid for it anyway
FP is good for people that really just want to get a site up but have no knowledge about HTML. I actually used it at first for about a month, but I was so code oriented from the start that I mostly just used the pages as code templates, and they were a bitch to figure out! I was, however, completely new. The FP extensions seem to be a strong feature of Front Page? But DW has support for SSI (server side includes) and I am not sure but I think they serve almost the same purpose. Enough rambling. I have to exist on free software these days, and this is what I do to keep using DW. I have my Windows XP installed on a partition 'C:\', and then I move 'My Documents' and favourites and cookies and desktop, LOL, to another partition, leaving the core of the OS and the program files and user data on drive (partition) C. Then, when 30 days trial is up, I format and reinstall Windows on C partition. It is then possible to install another trial and use it all over again for 30 days. You pretty much have to have your computer drives set up like this from the start. If you just have everything on one partition 'C' and no other partitions (or even free space in unpartitioned territory) then this is very technical (and scary) to set up.
Notepad Rules! In the hands of a competent designer FP can produce great work. DW has the ability to do so much more though. And has earned the respect of many an experienced webmaster. But for me myself its notepad all the way!