Buckeye Hello and Many Thanks to all who responded.
I have decided to take the Dreamweaver class.
I've convinced myself that I can do it if all of you can do it!
Ada G. Kent, Librarian
Ohio School for the Deaf
Columbus, OH
agkent@columbus.rr.com
I have worked with Dreamweaver. It is a very good program but not a simple
program and will take the 12 hours to do a good job with it. I do not find
the site I created easy to maintain. In fact, I don't maintain it. But
that may be because our server is in a different building and I can't seem
to access it. I do think Dreamweaver is very worthwhile knowing and if you
do it and you can access your server easily, then you should be fine with
this program. I can't compare it to the other program. Good luck.
I took a course in web design this summer and we had an option to use either
program. I chose Dreamweaver because my school has that program. The
people who opted for Front Page had many difficulties. The help menus and
tutorials in Dreamweaver are fantastic, and the Front Page users did not
seem to have the same level of help within the program.
I am familiar with Dreamweaver and love it, but I don't know Front Page
I've worked fairly extensively with both. I do my personal/professional
website with Dreamweaver from home; things here at Parkland are done with
Front Page becuase it's on more computers.
Sort answer: Front Page is cheaper, but Dreamweaver is the better program.
It is designed to work with other programs — so it has settings so that you
can import Front Page pages and work with them, and not "mess up" the things
that only Front Page does in its special Front Page way.
Longer version :-)
Front Page is, in some ways, easier to use because there are more things
that are done with the click of a button. When I wanted to put audio files
in a vocabulary exercise so students could click a button and hear the word
& definition read, those were options in the "make a button" process. I had
to go to my book to figure out how to do it in Dreamweaver (but it was easy
to find).
However, if you want to do something a little differently than Front Page
usually does it, it's a real exercise in frustration. For managing a whole
site Dreamweaver is far superior. Right now I'm utterly frustrated with the
task of being able to make a quick change to a page and upload it. Front
Page thinks I should "publish my web." Argh! Dreamweaver lets me see how all
the files are arranged and I can move back and forth from my computer to the
online version easily. The whole "setting up the site" process is also a
lot easier in Dreamweaver.
I believe Dreamweaver came out of the graphic design culture of the
Mac/Apple world (but works perfectly well on my PC).
Given a choice, most people I know in the web world prefer Dreamweaver; the
folks who don't started with Front Page and that's what they're used to.
It's also more widely available.
I have used both programs, but not extensively. In my experience, FrontPage
is easier to use, but Dreamweaver seems to be the program of choice for most
web developers. If you are taking a class, perhaps you will be able to learn
Dreamweaver; I tried to teach myself and have not been entirely successful.
I am thinking of taking a class myself.
Dreamweaver has a high learning curve and 12 hours won't be enough if you
don't have any website experience.
FrontPAge is easy to learn.
However, once you get Dreamweaver it is much superior to FrontPage. You can
start with FrontPage and graduate later. Dreamweaver will convert all your
FrontPage work rather easily.
I am a fan of FrontPage but it does throw in a lot of extra unneeded code
and double spaces everything. I learned html first so the whole process was
easy and I could easily fix what I don't like. If you don't have that, you
may be stuck.
To give you an idea - I can do a FrontPage web page in about two minutes
including the FTP. I have taken a couple intro to Dreamweaver classes and
still go back to FrontPAge. My district is pushing me to Dreamweaver so I
am taking a graduate level online course. Lots of work, lots of hours.
I am computer literate - you say you are not. If your district hasn't a
need for Dreamweaver at present and you want to get started, I'd recommend
FrontPage. I used to teach it in one day to ninth graders doing websites at
my previous school. They now offer a full semester course for kids to learn
Dreamweaver and I wouldn't "dream" of teaching even basics in less than 12
hours.
If you are familiar with Word and PowerPoint, you are a leg up for
FrontPage.
Good luck on your decision.
Dreamweaver makes pages that are more compliant with web standards than
FrontPage. (In fact, having noncompliant code is one of the things FP is
better known for.) FP code will look good with Internet Explorer, but not
necessarily with other browsers. (And remember that Firefox is up to over
25% of browser use, and still rising.)
FP is a bit easier for the newbie, as it has a lot of templates you can use,
and a more intuitive interface (especially if you're used to other Microsoft
products). Dreamweaver makes better code.
OTOH, if you don't need to do anything particularly fancy with your webpage,
you might want to avoid both products and try Nvu from the Mozilla folks (
http://www.nvu.com/ ). I've looked at the Windows version, and it looks
pretty easy to use - and it's free.
In any case, you will probably want to learn at least a little HTML. A great
place to start is with the tutorial at (
http://www.cwru.edu/help/introHTML/toc.html ). It teaches HTML 3, which is
quite outdated now, but the basics are still the same and it's the best free
interactive online tutorial I've found for teaching the basics.
You will also want to look at pages about accessibility; the ways of making
sure that people using various methods of reading your page (such as blind
folks using a text-reader) can read your page properly. If your page is
fairly simple this isn't usually too big a problem; the main thing to
remember is to always have an alternate point of access.
For instance, you need to put "Alt" tags under your images (in the code for
your images) to say what they are (or use a plain ( alt="") code to make the
images disappear from text-readers' views if the images are purely
decorative), and supply alternate means of accessing forms (such as
drop-down menus). A good sites about accessibility is at:
(http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/abdesign.html )
You might also want to check out the Web Design Group (
http://www.htmlhelp.com/ ). They have some good pages on web design, a nice
page about proper use of ALT tags in images, and an HTML validator you can
use to make sure that your code's okay.
I'd recommend starting with FrontPage. I started with it 7 years ago, and
felt like I outgrew it in a year or so, but it was the easier program to
"jump right in" with. Dreamweaver is infinitely more powerful & flexible,
but I ultimately had to take a 3 day course to crack the learning curve,
even with a couple years of FrontPage under my belt. There may be some
issues importing someone else's work into FrontPage. It really writes its
own "flavor" of code and is happiest when it's all-FrontPage, all the time.
It's been a few years since I've used it though; hopefully they've worked
out some of the bugs I experienced.
I am learning Dreamweaver at home using http://www.lynda.com
<http://www.lynda.com/> . Have you seen the HOT books published by
Peachpit Press & Lynda.com/books. The Hands_On Training books include
exercise files and movies on a CD. On the web site you can pay by the month
for however many months or month you want or get price break if you pay by
year, or a premium subscription that includes the exercise files for all the
software programs that you can watch training videos available on the site.
You can setup a free look at the site.
At our school we have Front Page as part of our MS package, so that is what
we use. That is also the program I have learned in the couple of webpage
design courses I've taken. I like using it - seems logical and "user
friendly". I've done a couple of webpages with it successfully, although
the library webpage is still in design (this task keeps moving to the bottom
of the list - just too many things to do!!).
I have not had any experience with Dreamweaver, but have heard folks say
that they like it alot because it has more features than Front Page. But if
you have limited experience with web design, than perhaps Front Page is the
way to go. If you can work around in MS Word or Publisher, then you
shouldn't have trouble with Front Page.
It also might depend on what is loaded on your computer already. You might
want to check with your tech person so see what s/he recommends or what the
state recommends.
I use both FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Our district has provided direct
access to our own protected site on the webserver through FrontPage so I use
that to make minor changes, upload files, work with .ASP programming
scripts; FrontPage has some Web components that are specific to a Windows
server and it's marvelous for working with other MS Office files that have
been converted to Webpages. It is however, a hog for space and odd tags.
I use Dreamweaver for just about everything else. First, it is easier to
learn and more intuitive for page creation, especially for making templates
and stylesheets; second, it isn't as glitchy when working with tables,
frames, and other complex structures; third, it has a lot of javascript
features, like drop-down navigation menus. It will clean up the dirty HTML
that MS applications create.
If the existing website you will be working with is on a Windows 2000 server
with IIS service, FrontPage might be easier to upload files and to take
advantage of some dynamic scripting and programming features specific to
Windows. On the other hand, if the server is Apache or some other type,
especially Linux, you might appreciate having Dreamweaver.
Whichever application you learn first, you'll probably prefer it--the nature
of learning. But once you learn one, you can easily pick up the ins and
outs of the other. Enjoy your entry into web authoring!
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