Microsoft Front Page as an alternative to building from scratch?

[Enilette]

I want to build a website for my handmade card business. I've read through the HTML tutorial and I've learned enough to know that I don't know enough! I get the general idea though. What do you experts think of Microsoft Front Page as an alternative. Does it tick all the W3C boxes for standardization?

[croatiankid]

No Nothing beats matches learning html and css.

[kanala]

First I used macromedia dreamweaver, it was good but a bit too complicated (well that's what I thought) and it had many tools which looked too complicateh d to use, even though it may have been simple. It was just too overdone.But now, the best tool that I have ever used is Microsoft Office frontpage, it has all the basic tools, and one that I especially like is the HTML reformat tool which tidies up all your HTML at the press of a button, so it's not a mess. If you want to use this tool, it's best to already know the basics of the HTML language because it doesn't really have options to help you code. However there is a special view where you look at the website in normal view (e.g. like in a browser) but you can edit things, e.g. images, tables, text etc without coding it yourself, saving a lot of time.

[Enilette]

I've done a little bit more research since I last posted and it seems that Microsoft Web Expression has superceded Front Page. Apparently it's more like Dream... in that it embraces standards. And it has the dual window. I've ordered it anyway - Well I've bid for it on an auction site. It's very expensive! Thanks for your replies

[SmokingMan]

Where these WYSIWYG editors make it easier to put together a page, if you're concerned about standards (as everyone should be), the only way to be sure your code is standards compliant is to learn HTML & CSS. It's not hard to do. Also, it's always good to at least have a grasp of how HTML & CSS work together. W3C has very easy to follow tutorials that will at least get you familiar with basic coding. I use HTML-Kit for authoring my pages. It's a free download and a good program to use, but you need to be somewhat familiar with HTML & CSS. I would urge you to at least try to work through a few tutorials.

[Html]

Where these WYSIWYG editors make it easier to put together a page, if you're concerned about standards (as everyone should be), the only way to be sure your code is standards compliant is to learn HTML & CSS. It's not hard to do. Also, it's always good to at least have a grasp of how HTML & CSS work together. W3C has very easy to follow tutorials that will at least get you familiar with basic coding. I use HTML-Kit for authoring my pages. It's a free download and a good program to use, but you need to be somewhat familiar with HTML & CSS. I would urge you to at least try to work through a few tutorials.

I would like to just make note, that some people find it hard to remember or try continuing with html, let alone anything like xhtml considering that isn't any more harder or quite the opposite. It isn't hard to learn as you said. And on the topic about "sloppy editors" do you think in future they'll support standards?

[richardgerbino]

The best way to go is to use Dreamweaver and use the design view until you're good enogh to start coding. I started with Dreamweaver when I was around 13 so I can tell you from experience it's not too complicated if you're just doing basic HTML/XHTML scripting. Even JavaScript is relatively easy with most versions of Dreamweaver.If you don't have it or don't want to spend the money you can always print out a basic HTM tutorial and use that as a guide while you type in notepad. Just keep in mind some basic tags to add style (like <font>). I don't think you'll require anything like advanced CSS or JavaScript so notepad would work nicely. Just save your files as a .html extension and they should run fine. Dreamweaver is still the better option though.WYSIWYG editors aren't generally good, because you mess and up and then you don't know what you did wrong. It's better to learn at the same time than just clicking buttons and hoping the site is displayed correctly.

[justsomeguy]

What do you experts think of Microsoft Front Page as an alternative. Does it tick all the W3C boxes for standardization?

I'm not aware of a single WYSIWYG editor, such as Frontpage, that produces code that is remotely standardized. Frontpage specifically is possibly one of the worst HTML generators around, right after MS Word. If your goal is standard code, hand-writing it is really the only way, it is very difficult to try and drag things around onscreen and expect the software to "get it right". People use editors like Frontpage or Dreamweaver because they want to make their site quickly, not because they want good code. I'm not trying to sound arrogant or anything, it's just a fact. I've never ever heard anyone utter the phrase "I use Dreamweaver because it produces good code", that's just not why people use those types of things. I write all of my pages myself, even for work, and it is immediately obvious when someone asks me to fix a page that I previously wrote that Dreamweaver screwed up. People load my page in Dreamweaver, try to edit it, save it, and everything looks wrong. Then they ask me to go back in a fix everything, and it is immediately obvious to me that they were using Dreamweaver because of all the <p> </p>, <font> tags, etc.

And on the topic about "sloppy editors" do you think in future they'll support standards?

One can only hope...

[SmokingMan]

I guess what it comes down to is; do you just want to get the pages done, or do you also want to actually be able to understand what you've done in the "rare" case that you may have to debug a problem. In my opinion, you should at least be able to grasp the basics of HTML & CSS.