Dreamweaver vs. FrontPage

For those just starting out building web pages, the question arises: "What web-authoring software to use?" The answer will depend on a number of factors, including cost and the type of work you would like to be able to do, both to start with and after some practice. There are a number of excellent low-cost programs out there, and three major programs that most professional designers use: Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive and Microsoft FrontPage. (Though not too many pros use FrontPage, but that is another story). I decided some time ago to go with Dreamweaver, so I know very little about GoLive – I've played with it on occasion, but find myself preferring Dreamweaver.

FrontPage is easiest of all three to learn, while Dreamweaver can be a bit daunting at first. If you can use MS word, you can use FrontPage, and you can do some neat stuff quickly. The problem with FrontPage is that if any of the features don't work the way they are supposed to or the page layout would look the way it is supposed to, well, forget about rolling up your sleeves fixing it in HTML editing mode. FrontPage generates the most convoluted, non-standards compliant bloat of any of HTML authoring tool on the market. Having closely examined the output, I have become convinced that it intentional and part of a strategy to lock-in users and possibly take over the whole Internet as well. Sounds crazy, but that is Microsoft.

Like many I started off using FrontPage. Eventually my site got complicated, and then things started not working properly. Tables wouldn't align properly. Things wrapped at odd points. Graphics would look fine locally, but different once published to the Internet. I spent weeks trying to figure the problems out. I finally gave up trying to fix things and decided to work on my site at a more basic page-for-page HTML level. Well, forget about exporting anything from FrontPage into other editors (Dreamweaver has an "Import from FrontPage" feature starting with version MX (3 years too late for me) that does a decent job, but the data is still amazingly bloated). The files that made up my site were convoluted beyond understanding, and I ended up simply recreating the entire site from scratch in Dreamweaver. From a technology perspective a FrontPage site is designed to be impossible to edit in anything but FrontPage. Intentional lock-in. FrontPage "webs" (the sites data files on your computer) are difficult to backup or move to another computer. I won't get into the details, but it is messy. Simply put, copying and restoring the folder is not enough.

The ease of use of FrontPage has a price. Experienced (and inexperienced) designers can spot a site built from a FrontPage template in an instant. All the cool FrontPage templates (maybe 50 in all) are well known - kind of like using a popular royalty free image in a branding campaign. It is harder to create all your own graphics yourself, and doing so eliminates almost all of the ease of use advantage that FrontPage has over Dreamweaver.

GoLive is somewhere between FrontPage and Dreamweaver; GoLive makes the creation of fancy eye-catching graphics easier, but at the expense of generally inscrutable code.

Once you have spent a few months with a book learning how to use it and know what you are doing and why, Dreamweaver is the clear leader in ease of use and versatility. But it takes some time to get proficient. And Dreamweaver forces you to understand HTML more than the others. In designing your page you will have to "think" HTML. This gives you the most versatility, but also requires the most knowledge.