Dreamweaver or Frontpage

As a web design instructor and web designer of 10 years I have used Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Golive, Coffecup and without fail, every time, Dreamweaver comes out number 1.

Phone 20 web design companies and I would bet that 18 of them use Dreamweaver.

 

frontpage for amateur. dreamweaver for pro.

 

Oh, and here's another quick tip for anyone on the DW8 trial, though MikMik's plan is pretty deft

Go to Macromedia and download their DW 8.0.1 Updater patch... in MM's own words...

 

I also started out with Frontpage and I found it very friendly to use.... For some reason I'd never heard of Dreamweaver, but when it was recommended to me, I tried it out, and have never given frontpage a thought since. I actually wished I knew about Dreamweaver from the start.. I'd say go with dreamweaver from start..

 

Dreamweaver user too
I don't use it for the WYSIWYG but it has excellent additional tools, like the basic search/replace with regex support, the validator, the browser compatibility tester, accessibility report, etc. Got even better now with the code folding and such, comes in very handy

I've used frontpage a very long time ago, so I can't really compare it to DW, although at the time I used it DW was far superior for me.

 

...so i should probably convert from FP to dreamweaver then?

 

Frontpage is the worst commercial wysiwyg software program I have ever run across. Dreamweaver is the standard. Yet it is very easy to use and learn.

 

Download the 30 day trial of Dreamweaver at macromedia.com and see if it suits you. It's a matter of personal preferences, for some people Front Page may be better than DW.

 

Frontpage makes unvalidated, poor, heavy code

 

where can i go to learn about frontpage and dreamweaver, a sort of quick-start familiarisation site?

 

dreamweaver is more user friendly than front page..

 

but it's still nothing to my standard editor - Notepad

 

I like the fact DW does quick tag markup, thus saving me the typing and allowing time to do other productive things; far more efficient than NP

 

I have used both and dreamweaver is the way to go

 

i would go dreamweaver ALL the way

 

hmm i dwnload DW free trail, and find its very hard to use, where i can learn using dreamwaver?

 

Have you downloaded the Dreamweaver 8 documentation? (PDFs in ZIP) There's a "Getting Started" PDF in there.

Or you could try the Getting Started with DW8 page at Macromedia.

I don't know if they're any good as I'm a DW4 "old-timer" but I hope they help

 

Frontpage sucks. I have never used, but was often annoyed by pages done in FP.
Dreamweaver is it. Its a professional programm, but also easy to use.
If you can't afford it, there are also free editors,that are better than FP

 

Well if you judge a WYSIWYG editor by the code it generates everyone of them sucks imho. What matters is in who's hand the tool is, an amateur designer can make sucky websites and code in both FP and DW and a good designer can make something great in both of them.

But AFAIK DW does offer more functionality to design a good website, atleast if you don't use the WYSIWYG mode because it tends to either generate tables or very ugly CSS (absolute positioning everywhere, makes no sense at all).

 

I have FP and use it on my first two sites. As soon as my sites earn enough to justify the cost of DW, I'll switch. While FP appears to be easy in the WYSIWYG mode, the mess underneath is not fun to clean up. Merely cutting and pasting what appears in design view screws everything up in code - bits and pieces of open and closed tags, img src's divorced from a href, etc. Ugly - WYSINWYG. Since I am now used to writing only on the code page, or directly in my server C-Panel, I will likely jettison FP from here on out.