If you intend to buy something, I would suggest Dreamweaver MX 2004 bundled with Fireworks, but it is so expensive that few people can afford it. It also depends what exactly you need to do with the software. If it is server-side language like asp, or php, and you are not a coder, then Dreamweaver is a good solution.

If, instead, you are interested in producing quality webpages that are static, then you might settle for a component of Dreamweaver, which is similar to topstyle. In fact, buying only Homesite 5.5, also offered by Macromedia, will cut the price down to circa $100. What you get is a code-view, plus a very good CSS editor for colors and other styles.

If you already own Photoshop, you don't need Fireworks, obviously, although the latter is more efficient, web-wise. The bottom line is that I would think twice about buying Dreamweaver, settling instead on Homesite, or Topstyle, whilst I would never recommend FrontPage to anyone.

Adobe GoLive is another option, and is currently the only bigass web-design program that has Opera's rendering engine built-in, but it is pricey, and difficult to use, and leaves a lot to be desired as far as its formatting abilities go, including code efficiency.

hth,

Em

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"Living Life is not made up of material things"

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Edited by - valrievomit on 5/9/2004 9:33:19 PM

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Adone has identical prices (not surprisingly), so price isn't a differentiating factor.

Whatever you do, make sure that you have 1GB of RAM at the minimum. These apps are memory-hogs.

Em

edit: You can download limited-time, fully-functional previews of both applications, and see if they fit your preferences, etc.

Edited by - em on 5/9/2004 9:52:08 PM

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I am always trying to find something better. I am currently looking at Namo WebEditor 6, but it seems buggy. :-(

-- Snowman

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"Living Life is not made up of material things"

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I want to add something you may not have thought of, but I did when it was WAY too late, and that was is the site going to possibly end up large and VERY interactive?

Reason I say this is because when I built my site, I started in pure HTML (I knew the code, so I did it by hand), but as I see I wanted many links on a page (look at one of my reviews) and realized, I'd have to update every page when I added a review. I'm not sure your intent on the site, but regardless of what you plan to do with it, consider the content and if it's going to change or could change often. If so, I would recommend also learning a web language such as PHP or ASP along with a database (MySQL is the only one I'll recommend). Just a thought though, if you interested I can point you to a kick ass PHP/MySQL book. I wish you good luck!

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Em

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PL:

Actually I do plan on adding on to my page and updating it often. I know that it will have a lot pictures and links on it. I would be grateful for any books you recommend.

"Living Life is not made up of material things"

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Edited by - PL on 5/11/2004 6:19:12 PM

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I'm a coder by nature so that's why I suggest a language (ASP/PHP), if you have any coding background in C or C++, you'll pick up PHP REALLY fast.

I haven't messed with XML so I can't speak on its behalf, although I would wonder which would be faster the DB or this "cms".

Additionally, I don't know how much XML can do, but the nice thing about PHP is you can do string manipulation and number manipulation. At any+rate, I would suggest this book

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It is not true that static output implies static management, i.e. changes done to each and every file. I'll illustrate.

Assume you have a blog, with a blogroll on each page in your 300 pages. You do not need a database to call the blogroll data from a separate file. You can do the same on Apache via server-parsed html. You keep the blogroll in a separate file, and update only once. Apache then appends an updated file to all pages that have a call embedded, via server-parsed ssi. No knowledge of database required, no database required, either.

Furthermore, assume you have a 1000-page site, all static html. 666 of these 1000 pages link to a page X. Now, you want to change the filename of X. You seem to be under impression that this is done by hand. In fact, good software will update all links to that file automatically. Not as good as database or ssi, but still it does not require you to slave away changing links by hand. Similarly, a sitewide change and replace will take care of additions and other changes.

What I intend to say is that there is life, efficient life, beyond the database. The latter has problems of its own, often related to human-unreadable URI output, inability to handle Unicode, as well as sloppy output html that is nowhere near optimized, as well as chokes the user agents with unnecessary lint they have to download each time.

If I were the one to mention pure html, I would have clean, minimal, xhtml/xml in mind. How you manage it, build dynamically via functions, modularize via SSI, or manage in a truly static way - is a matter of convenience, and as such is not related to the quality of final output.

Em

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"Living Life is not made up of material things"

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Em

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