Building websites is my profession. People who tell you to build websites with notepad (or some other plain text editor) do not build websites 40+ hours a week. You just can't build websites fast enough if you have to type every flippin' < > tag.

My weapon of choice? Dreamweaver, hands down. Front page is just horrid. Sure, in the WYSIWYG editor it looks beautiful, but as soon as you look at the code it makes you either cry or vomit... or both. Not to mention, I have yet to see a Front Page site look right in anything but IE.

Adobe has GoLive, which I've played with some... it seems to be geared to the more media-rich-but-not-much-functionality crowd. Layout is a snap, it works in conjunction with Photoshop wonderfully, but for actually application sites I found it a bit weak.

Dreamweaver is the shiznizzy in my book. It supports several programming platforms (ASP, ColdFusion, PHP) pretty seamlessly. Basic functions are prebuilt, like authenticating against a database or retrieving records. Just design the page, click a few buttons and boom, you have a functional interface to your database. Integration with Fireworks is good too, but I don't care for Fireworks. I'm a Photoshop kind of guy.

Either way, a good site design package is going to cut your development time 60-70% easily. It's not "cheating" and doesn't show a lack of experience, it means your time is better spent doing something than trying to type <tr> and <td> over and over and over.

 

 

 

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The best free thing you can get is Nvu, but there is no substitute for Dreamweaver.

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I would tend to agree with you. Nvu is a pretty decent HTML editor (from my limited experience with it, about 5 minutes). The best part about it is the price - there is none (for the uneducated folks out there, it's free). But Dreamweaver stands out from the pack. It has a well justified price tag, since it has so many tools for site design and development. I hear that it supports ASP.Net, PHP, ASP, ColdFusion, Flex and a bunch of other formats. I wish I could get Dreamweaver, but for now I'll stick with Mambo (leave that for another topic).

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I use Dreamweaver as well. I used the 30 day trial a while back and ended up buying the thing because I liked it so much. It does a lot of the coding for you. You just type in the attribute and it has an autocomplete to help you out. It also shows when an error made but changing the color of the text. If you want to make a form it helps you out with that too by asking you the info you want and it codes it for you. Really helpful and I like it a lot.

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Earlier, I used notepad for designing purposes. Later I used Frontpage. But due the incompatiable coding system of Frontpage, I learned Dreamweaver. Its not easy to design websites using dreamweaver but you will get a good standard coding. Anyways WebPage maker is also a good website design software for newbies

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I like frontpage is is easy to use and has some geat features, but it can cause problems when trying to publish your website, such as saying that the sever your trying to publish to does on have frontpage extentions installed even though you do. The coding system in frontpages is easy to learn, you can insert your own HTMl and edit it from within frontpage, so you don't have to use another editor.

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theres also this nice program that comes with windows lol

notepad... or wordpad

eitherway thats the way to go because dreamweaver and frontpage leave there own little sniplets of code everywhere and make the code look all shity and hard to read...

so if you know how to do it code it by hand and open a webbrowser to test the site

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I use dreamweaver, i think is great tool to build the pages. Write the code it's really simple and the progran helps you a lot to do it.

But i have had many problems with the FTP server working online, not with internal server localhost. So i write the code with dreamweaver, but i use CuteFTP to upload files into my host.

The problem is basically that the upload rate is very slow, i don't know why, maybe i have bad configuration of server.

I have tried EZ-Generator, and i think is one of the best site maker that uses templates.

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Too me i think it's just stupid not to use frontpage or dreamweaver because they save you time. If i were to use notepad... it would take me forever. Plus so many professionals use dreamweaver. I don't know why it's not "cool" to use it or its not "hardcore". I would have to say i have tried tons of different programs and dreamweaver is the best. For books, i know this sounds dumb, you should go to your library and look at books there. They are free and they have some expensive books. I taught myself a lot that way.

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it sounds like the majority of the people use dreamweaver, also it's just like anything else, why would you make the same ting from scratch over and over, especially when you already have a premade template, or and easy plug in and go.

Im mean you can still do exactly what you want, and if you you know how to code on note pad with out using dreamweaver wwll its just a plus..

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