Being a complete novice to Web design & stuff, I built a complete & successful web site just using Word2003!

However, some of my pages take ages to load into my browser (they are quite big, with a lot of HTML banner links to other sites).

I'm wondering if it's due to Word working in a 'clumsy' way & having loads of unnecessary code etc...

If I switched to FrontPage (or similar), do you think page loading would be significantly faster?

Thanks for any help!
KK.

PS: Anyone tried CoffeeCup software? Apparently cheap but good...?

This post has been edited by KasinoKing: Jan 10 2007, 01:22 PM

You are absolutely correct. Word adds so much extraneous code that the page is basically over-bloated and doesnt perform well at all.

I think frontpage isn't all that great either (but probably better than Word).

I hear Dreamweaver is good, and there are also some free ones out there that you can download that do an OK job - I've heard good things about HTML-Kit, for example.

You also have the option of hand-coding. HTML is a quick learn, and kinda fun once you get the hang of it, IMO.

Id agree with the above post however be sure to check the loading times on the images too as images slow down the page so they should be as small(in file size) as possible.

If you have the time andf effort then HTML is definately a useful language to learn and it isnt that hard, you kind of learn as you go along, ive been doing it for a couple of years now and i just learn what i need to for the page im designing and over the time ive mad a lot of pages and learnt more with each one.

But if you really cant be bothered then try dreamweaver or some alternative, i dont really reccomend frontpage.

Agreed on the other to posts word and front page both use a lot of junk code in their sites. Frontpage will help load the pages quicker but I wouldn't use it.

CoffeeCup is pretty good, never used it much, I do now they provide a lot of pre-installed javascripts which are somewhat beneficial, but come with some junk code.

Although it's nothing like frontpage or dreamweaver, but 1st Page 2000 is a good editor for novices it is almost like coffeecup but more like dreamweaver, although I haven't used it in years I don't what changes they made. But it is still free though which is good.

I would also like to present http://www.oswd.org for free templates. This does not use FrontPage or any other editing software. But these templates do not include any unnecessary codes and most of them are very clean and fast loading.

Sometimes I learn faster by observing examples. This, I found, to be much more effective although some people think that it's an unbalanced study of coding/programming. If you do find a template that you feel it will meet your needs, you can simply insert HTML codes/tags to place your own banners, graphics and/or images. And you can observe how the web page renders with web codings.

HTML may be the basic foundation of all good web page but using just HTML these days isn't enough. CSS is the leading structure format to all good web pages and you should prepare for CSS designing with HTML codes. OSWD.org offers good examples of CSS+HTML designs.

I soon found that Notepad is my best editor for all my web design.

I'd say taht Dreamweaver is the best editor around.

Here are some website builders for newbies,
* Evrsoft First Page 2006
* Ace HTML
* Serif PagePlus
* WebSide

Well notepad and some good habits will always be your best solution, but if you do not know html, I would use the 30 day dreamweaver trial or frontpage if you have to.

If you don't feel like redoing the site in another editor, I would atleast edit your image tags to contain height and width, because I doubt word adds these manually. So find tags that look like this

and change it to:

where you replace the 'some number's with each image's respective height and width.

This is probably the quickest way to speed up the loading speed of your sites.