For several years I've been building (rank amature) websites using an old version of Frontpage and have decided to update.

I'm about half way through a trial period of Dreamwever CS4. So far I'm fairly impressed.

For what it's worth, I usually build the structure in WYSIWYG (using tables) and tweak it in HTML.

I'm just getting into CSS.

Anybody have any recommendations of other applications I can try before biting the bullet on Dreamweaver?

Edit - I should clarify. When I say "rank amature" websites, I'm referring to the construct, not the content. (no dirty stuff!)

I used to use early Front Page and then went to Front Page 2003. I did not care for it but it worked for "amateur" type websites. Simple websites are fine. However, I do not like all the overhead and strange folders it created. I switched to Dreamweaver earlier this year and am quite satisfied with it. I am using Dreamweaver CS3 and am redoing one website with it and it is much better. I created one website in a half hour for one individual and she is using Dreamweaver to modify and mold it to her tastes and desires and is creating a second website from it, also.

I would, and did, get the Adobe Creative Suite, which includes Dreamweaver.

If you have a kid in school, you can get the educational version pretty cheaply. The only difference is the price.

You might even slip some neighbor college kid a $20 and have them get the Adobe suite through their college library. Usually will run about 50%-60% of boxed retail price and is the same thing.

Yep. I use it, along with co-workers. It's a great tool, and you could do much worse!

Excellent...

I spent most of the lousy weather day yesterday working through their tutorials.

Thanks for your input.

As luck would have it, my son just started working as an Educator a couple of weeks ago.

"Anybody have any recommendations of other applications I can try before biting the bullet on Dreamweaver?"

Yup--Kwrite (Write or Wordpad if you are on Win16/32, in "Text file" mode) and Firefox. Been doing it like that for years.

I've been using DW since '00. I built my first website in '97 with a text editor. Then I started using a now long gone piece of software called Adobe Pagemill, which was about as useful(less) as Front Page. When taking some night courses at Portland State I bought the Macromedia Dreamweaver/Flash combo and I've never looked back. I'm currently using Adobe CS3 Web Premium. The upgrades last year were incredibly low priced (I had already taken my DW from educational to full license pka "Studio" and to upgrade to CS3 from Studio was unbelievably cheap). One of the unsung heroes in the suite is Fireworks. It's not a replacement for Photoshop, you need both, but Fireworks does some things for web optimization that Photoshop doesn't. That's why they are both in the CS Web Premium package.

No, you don't need any of it for simple web sites.

Just a text editor and a code book.

Burma Shave.

Whooooo oooooohh Dreamweaver, I believe you can get me through the night
Dreamweaver, I believe we can reach the morning liiiiiiiiiight..........

(Because Muzak's playing that particular song on FM1 right now, and I'm surprised no-body's brought it up yet...... ;o)

I still write all my web pages in plain HTML! Well, almost - I also write almost everything in Perl scripting language. The Perl scripts write the HTML dynamically. I also use some CSS and throw in Javascript for some whizzy effects and for form processing.

And for that, I use a very powerful text editor called Emacs. Not for everyone, but it's the way I've been working for more than a decade. See no reason to change.

Andrew

A decade??? I was using emacs 30 years ago on a DEC system. Even modified it to make it easier and better, like KED. When I started working with PC's, I got microemacs and modified the source code to make it work better. Still use it if I want to edit basic text code. Still have all the source code for it, also.

You can write in pure HTML in Dreamweaver, also, if you want to. Generally, I do my pages in the html mode. It is still easier to use Dreamweaver even if you want to write in just code.

Basically, I use whatever works best for the task at hand. Also depends on what I learned and stayed with. I still prefer WordPerfect to MS-Word....particularly when putting proposals together and working with hidden code....much easier and better with WP than Word.

I like WP because you can link documents and make conditional macros.

That's the reason so many attorneys use the thing. Enter a coupla parameters and you've got a 10 page pleading, formatted according to the local court rules, with no goofy errors to litigate and lower profit!

Personally I like Open Office's M$-Word clone. Sometimes I use Abiword but OO's programme is soooooo much more capable.

(Bloated and a little slow, yes, but it can also make PDF files.)

Eons ago I used Word Perfect. Hell, at Cascade circa 1996/7 I first learned to type using Word Perfect on a 286 connected to a really, really ancient LAN set up in the classroom.

"A decade??? I was using emacs 30 years ago on a DEC system. Even modified it to make it easier and better, like KED. When I started working with PC's, I got microemacs and modified the source code to make it work better. Still use it if I want to edit basic text code. Still have all the source code for it, also."

Were you also using TECO, by chance?

(Does anybody even still use TECO for anything any more??)

"I still write all my web pages in plain HTML!"

Me too. I would never assume that every person on the planet has a fast internet connection.

HTML is still a great way to make webpages. Then again, I started out in BASIC on a TRS-80 and the venerable PET in the early 80s. Nobody but the pulp prophets of sci-fi could have predicted that we would have come this far in such a relatively short time.

TECO might be gone, but TEBO is still going strong.

Did you know Dream Weaver was one of KSKD's most played tracks? Royalies from KSKD kept Gary in green.

"Were you also using TECO, by chance?"
Yes, but only for a short time.
Used Vi when writing in C. Very cryptic, just like C.
Used EDT, KED, and Emacs when writing in Pascal. EDT on the VAX, KED the runtime OS on the machine. It was a smaller set of EDT. Used Emacs on the RSTS system and set it up to emulate EDT. EDT/KED is what we were used to using and when I was at Tek, I got this huge RSTS system with only Emacs so I modified it and named it EDT to make it transparent to the others. That was our programming system using VT-100's. Couldn't use it on the systems because Tek used their own funky monitors with a storage trace and did not have a keypad. The 500MB Hard drives were the size of a washing machine. Had 3 of them plus a few 10MB platters the size of a large pizza. Or was it Extra-Large?

You have more computing power in a small laptop than we had in that RSTS system that took three racks and 3 floor washing machine sized drives. It took 15 minutes to boot that thing up. You knew when it was about done when the drive would move across the floor.