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December 17, 2008

FrontPage vs. Dreamweaver

When it comes to easy web creation, beginners generally have two choices: Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver.  Both feature the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor which allows you to design web pages like a pro.  Which one is better?  Lets see if we can pick a winner.

FronPage

Like other Microsoft products, FrontPage comes with a number of pre-designed templates ready for use.  Whether it's a small personal site or large site for your online business, it can be created with FrontPage in a few easy clicks - simply enter some text and your images and that's it.

The authoring capabilities this program offers is the reason it's the preferred choice by many novice web designers.

One of the best things about FrontPage is that it allows you to view your pages exactly as they will appear in Internet Explorer and other web browsers.  It also tends to work in perfect harmony with other Microsoft technologies such as the MS SQL and MS Access database and the ASP programming language.  FrontPage interacts seamlessly with other Microsoft Office applications as well.  For instance, it's simple to cut a chart you created in Excel and then paste it into your FrontPage working area.

The main drawback to FrontPage is that it uses tables with a fixed width by default.  This could be frustrating for someone who plans to create pages of various sizes.

Dreamweaver

The Dreamweaver program allows you to create templates of your own.  These templates can be used to edit dozens to hundreds of pages on your site with a simple click of the mouse.  The web pages you create with Dreamweaver usually result in clean HTML coding that looks nearly perfect in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape and Opera.  Similar to how FrontPage interacts smoothly with other Microsoft applications, Dreamweaver works well with other Macromedia products.

Dreamweaver is amazing at handling SSI files and the server-side include technology in general.  Programming languages such as PHP and Python look great when incorporating them with this program while FrontPage excels when using ASP.  In most cases, the editors in both programs do a fine job at displaying CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).  However, Dreamweaver is more prone to error when entering style attributes and can terribly blemish your pages whereas FrontPage handles these error with ease.

Recommendations

As with most comparisons, there are advantages and disadvantages that come along with both editors.  Those mentioned here are the most significant and could weigh heavily on your decision.  In our opinion, FrontPage is more suited for beginners as it is much easier to use, comes with great support and provides numerous templates that allow you to create an entire website very quickly.  We recommend moving up to Dreamweaver when you become more familiar and comfortable with HTML coding.  Freehand coding gives you the ability to use tags and styles however you desire but errors can slow down the developing process significantly.

After mastering either program, the results you achieve will look as if you've been designing web pages for years.

Tags: WYSIWYG,  Microsoft,  Macromedia,  FrontPage,  Dreamweaver,  CSS,  ASP