hello all, for the past several years i build my basic website using frontpage. i am finding that alot of hosting companies are fading out the frontpage extensions on their servers. i am considering redoing my site using dreamweaver. i was always told that frontpage writes terrible code and is not search engine friendly. is dreamweaver better??
Dreamweaver writes bloated, semantically-incorrect garbage. Programs don't write code, and they don't write SEO-friendly, or correct, or good sites. The programmer does that. If you can't write a good site (using a plain text editor, like Notepad), no program is going to do it for you. (Dreamweaver has one really good purpose - to move $500 from your pocket to Adobe's account.)
Dreamweaver is definitely a step up from Frontpage and it's great for folks who don't want to get into the code. That being said, if you are concerned with seo and proper markup semantics, you should start spending more time in code view. As you get better at writing your own code, you won't need Dreamweaver and you'll want to start looking at text editors and IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) that are more geared towards programmers rather than designers. Please don't try writing HTML, or anything at all, in plain old notepad. It's not necessary to put yourself through so much pain. There are plenty of free text editors out there that have syntax highlighting, autocomplete, and snippets - features that real programmers use to make their work more efficient. Notepad++ is powerful, lightweight and free. You can also check out Aptana Studio. There are many other good ones, a lot of them are free - so find the one that you like best and matches your workflow style.
Sorry to hear you've been led down the garden path to failure like that... Assuming they wasted time having them in the first place. Just as bad -- if not worse because there are people out there making lame excuses for it. IF you care about the code generated by it, and IF you are interested in making sites that take into account bandwidth use, accessibility and standards -- you are NOT going to get that out of using a WYSIWYG or typing directly into a 'preview pane' or any of the rest of that broken nonsense. That's what the others here are implying when they say "notepad" or "flat text editor"... you should be working with your HTML and CSS directly, NOT through some goofy GUI. They ALL make non-semantic markup with no separation of presentation from content, and worse usually they can't even make such pages work cross browser! (see the link in your siggy, busted layout here in Opera and FF) Since it appears you are coming from a visual drag and drop and type directly into the rendered page way of doing things, you've been packed so full of sand you could change your name to Sahara. There are a whole slew of concepts you are going to need to learn if you want to work well with search, different browsers, alternative browsing engines, You're going to need to learn semantic markup -- your HTML saying what things ARE, not what they look like!. This means numbered headings for headings, paragraphs around actual flow paragraphs (and not just around things that aren't even text or a word or three), lists around your lists... It also means not using tags that make no sense like tables around non-tabular data. That way you have a baseline that all potential user-agents (browsers, search engines, screen readers, braille readers) can use... you then progressively enhance that markup for your fancy appearance using external CSS (giving you separation of presentation from content) while changing as little of the markup as possible... then enhance with javascript as needed. This way, building from a clean semantic baseline and enhancing it with other technologies gives you graceful degradation when those fancy bits are unavailable or simply do not apply to the specific target. So far if you've been using Frontpage or any other rubbish WYSIWYG, all you've thought about is "what does it look like on my screen" -- which means you've COMPLETELY missed the point of the Internet and HTML. By definition WYSIWYG's have to use presentational markup to build a page, the antithesis of accessibility, missing the point of HTML and CSS, and in general firmly wedging one's head up 1997's backside. Which is part of how on that fortune cookie site you have 108k of HTML to deliver 16k of plaintext and 20 or so content images-- anywhere from three to five times as much code as should have been used for such a site!
deathshadow, this is why i turn to this forum, experts like yourselt simply don't sugar coat anything, in know my site is a mess and i need help. i have been doing business for close to 7 years now and my site has served me well, with that being said, having the site live for all these years my ranking in google should be much better than it is, what can you do to help??
What is your website based on? If your website is just informational and you are not willing to code, I could recommend you learn how to use a CMS such as Joomla or other software such as wordpress. These are generally good for creating sites, however for maximum customisation it is probably best to learn to code too.
I agree that joomla is one of the best software to write down a code for web developer. He can easily create web design and write down the code for it and he can easily implement on joomla.
front page is a old story ,there are many other programs notepad ++, Microsoft expression web and Dreamweaver, i suggest you to use Dreamweaver or expression web