Microsoft Frontage, is it worth it?

[Maljonic]

Someone told me today, by email, that they're getting quite into making websites using frontpage and wanted to know if I could show them how to make things a bit more complicated so visitors can edit their own page and log in with a password, and add a search to his site.

I was about to reply that he might want to consider using dreamweaver instead as it might be easier to set this up, but I'm kind of only thinking that because I always thought frontpage was poo so I never really used it, so really don't know how to do this with frontpage.

So what I want to know is, am I doing frontpage a diservice by recommending he use something else - would it actually be pretty easy to do what he wants with frontpage? I mean if he really likes frontpage I don't want to tell him to bin it if there's no real need to.

 

[SheepCow]

Oh dear god people aren't allowed to use frontpage.
Last time I looked at it (many years ago) it was evil and produced crappy html that IE2 could render but nothing else.

On the plus side, Microsoft Web Expression or something like that is coming out soon that is supposed to *fingers crossed* create standards compliant code and actually be worth looking at.

 

[KevinUK]

Dreamweaver and Frontpage are both evil and nobody who uses them can call themselves designers. Notepad is best

Frontpage is dead and what SheepCow is on about is its replacement. So tell them to buy whatever is cheapest I guess, DW or the new MS thingy.

 

[Maljonic]

That's pretty much what I thought, but my ideas about frontapge are about 3 years old so I just wondered if it had improved. Obviously not, I'll offer lesson in notepad.

 

[MYstIC G]

Dreamweaver and Frontpage are both evil and nobody who uses them can call themselves designers. Notepad is best

Frontpage is dead and what SheepCow is on about is its replacement. So tell them to buy whatever is cheapest I guess, DW or the new MS thingy.

edit.com tbfh

*mocks your heritage*

 

[Alan]

edit.com tbfh

*mocks your heritage*

edlin.com tbfh !

*mocks your mocking*

 

[Shovel]

Current versions of Dreamweaver are much improved WRT HTML output, but I'm yet to see any WYSIWYG editor that handles CSS layout with any grace.

Frontpage is certainly to be avoided at all costs. It _is_ awful and it is about to be replaced with Expression (which _is_ much better and _apparently_ has a very good CSS editor system, which I've not used yet).

If they must use a WYSWYG editor then Dreamweaver 8 isn't bad, just make sure you train them to use the Split View all the time, encorage them to learn what the code is really doing, even if they still type into the rendered view.

 

[Maljonic]

I'm a big fan of dreamweaver 8, but I still don't use its css panel. I prefer to just type my style sheets and use the dropdown menus sometimes that appear.

I don't really like the split screen view, prefer to have just the code view and occasionally use design view to get a view of where I am before skipping back to code view.

 

[SheepCow]

For anyone interested in Expression there is a beta:
http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/web_designer/wd_free_trial.aspx