BleepingComputer.com: web page creator

Hi there guys, well the time has come for me to learn how to create a buisness webpage. I am totally new to this and know nothing apart from the fact that i have looked all over the internet for clues and information as to what program i should be using. I have stumbled on the microsoft program that is called "Microsoft Frontpage". I have "Microsoft office 2007", but dont have Frontpage. Which is the best option for me, with what i have already. I am thinking of downloading Frontpage if it is available but would prefer to download it from a reliable source. I have tried the Microsoft web site , but get confused as they are directing me to other programs which has nothing to do with Frontpage. I am thinking that front page is part of some other program as a bonus program. I am really starting to get confused, so any help would be a big help. Thanks and regards Grassy

I looked around at the Office official site and it seems that the 2007 pack doesn't include frontpage. The XP/2003-packs are no longer available for sale.
So it seems you will have to search for something else.

I have frontpage installed and I think there are some pretty good alternatives, I am not very happy with frontpage. Unfortunately I have no experience with other programs (after the frontpage-disappointment I gave up) so I cannot give you any names of good programs.

Thanks for your input

Frontpage is a template driven package and at times can be difficult to use, especially for new users. I tried it years ago and just never liked it.

If you are willing to learn by building manually....meaning no templates then Dreamweaver is a fabulous program. This program offers web site design in either coding or WYSIWYG. Or you can split your screen in two and see both. Doing a Google search you may run across it as Macromedia and or Adobe. Well Macromedia created the software and eventually was absorbed by Adobe.

To really learn the software I suggest a Google search for "Dreamweaver tutorials" and you should find numerous sites teaching this great software package. To compliment Dreamweaver I use Photoshop as well for all my layouts and image creation.

http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/

Microsoft Frontpage is being replaced with Microsoft Office SharePoint Web Designer 2007 and Microsoft Expression Web Designer. Both of them are based on Microsoft FrontPage but serve different audiences.

This post has been edited by Steeldogs: 01 May 2009 - 07:10 AM

Thanks for your reply and the great information you have provided. Photoshop is a program i have, so i now know what it can be used for. Dreamweaver was one of those programs that i thought would be a little too complicated for myself until i read your post. Its amazing what someone elses opinion can do for you. I will start googling and see where i land.

Totally agree with everything Steeldogs stated in a previous post. I first learned web design using FrontPage 98, then moved to FrontPage 2000, then the 2003 edition. I now use Dreamweaver exclusively as my HTML editior. It's not that difficult to learn, and it is a much much better HTML editor that writes much better code than FrontPage ever will.

I can't say if SharePoint Designer or Expression Web have been an improvement with the coding issue, because since I've moved to Dreamweaver, I've stuck with that.

I teach web design to high school students and always had started teaching them using FrontPage simply because it was so like all of the other Office software products so I felt the students had an easier time learning it. After using it for several years where we actually maintained real websites (and one of our sites was built in FrontPage 2003 and all the others in Dreamweaver), I realized that FrontPage was not the way to go. Students learned Dreamweaver just as easily (if not more so) than they did FrontPage, probably because Dreamweaver doesn't seem to have all of the little quirks in it that FrontPage tends to have.

When it comes to actually publishing your site, too, FrontPage tends to create a slew of hidden folders that are specific just to that software. We FTP all of our files to our server, and it got to be a nightmare to keep up with showing all of the hidden files and determining which we had transferred and which had not (even though we had not even touched them). Dreamweaver is so much simpler to FTP, and for that matter, back up to another drive for safety.

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It did. Frontpage has been deprecated in favor of Expression Web, which is a much better IDE. I have not used Dreamweaver too often, but I have maintained pages created in Dreamweaver. I do not think the code is as clean as what is auto-generated by Expression Web.

groovicus, on May 2 2009, 03:03 PM, said:

Interesting to know. That's one of the reasons that I quit teaching FrontPage was because of the coding issues. I wrote a software review for my school district to adopt Expression Web two years ago to replace FrontPage (partially because the colleges offer it to students there for an insanely cheap price). My school district declined the review stating that Dreamweaver was the "industry standard" and that's all I needed to teach, and they had just forked over big bucks for a district site license for CS3 (which included Dreamweaver). So I never got a chance to "test-drive" it on my students. Not yet, at least

What does cs3 and cs4 stand for and whats the difference. Sorry for sounding a little simple, i am new to all this stuff.

grassy, on May 2 2009, 11:54 PM, said:

CS3 is Adobe Creative Suite version 3, and CS4 is Adobe Creative Suite Version 4. Prior to that it was CS2, and just plain CS (for Creative Suite), and Design Suite. Adobe continually upgrades their packages.

Take a look here to see what's in the CS4 family: Adobe - Creative Suite 4 family

Thanks for the info txtchr, its all starting to hit home.

groovicus, on May 2 2009, 03:03 PM, said:

Your right dreamweaver does like to chuck in wired tags ect when it is used as a WYSIWYG. I use it as a code editor to write my own code and it amazing! dont be fooled into thinking that if you use dreamweaver you have to use it as a WYSIWYG

tbh what you use depends what you want? What kinda of things are you going to need your website to do?

Id always advise hand coding if you want to take a stab at it have a read of the w3schools website http://www.w3schools.com/