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Nowadays everyone uses front page, it seems to me that i am one of the few that writes all my code in raw form, i don't use front page at all, and i never would, html, xml, php, java script all in my head, now i make websites for valentines day and i get mad money with just writing my code once, than i use my great skills at copy and pasting. lol. but if u are a true writer, and no html, java, ..... proggy user than post here to know that u are not alone.
I learned HTML when i was 10. It's not that hard. There're some good tutorials out there on HTML. If you're gonna do anything with the web, you should learn the language of the web.
Yeah, i write all my own HTML and javascript, but i havent done a webpage in forever. Think i might just do one now for kicks.
I write all my HTML, CSS and PHP from scratch using text editors, but most people I know use Frontpage or Dreamweaver. WYSIWYG editors are improving, but you can still tell when someone has used one rather than hand-coded everything.
Each to their own I suppose though, it took me a long time to learn HTML and everything else, it's probably not worth the effort unless you run a lot of sites.
I started with netscape Composer but then after recommendations from some great fellow AO people moved to evrsofts FirstPage. It's a great editor with a tutorial and has preview capabilities.
What bugs me with WYSIWYG engines are the overhead in the finished product. I can easily save 30 - 50% in size by coding it myself. I know no one worries about size anymore. I learned fortran programming in the 70's, the largest a program could be was 8K.
I also take the boxboard tubes out of my toilet paper when I go backpacking!
I have to admit, I'm a user of Dreamweaver, but it's very good for layout, especially when dealing with sliced images (and why you would handcode those, is beyond me, when it is easily done - without bloat - if you know how to go back in and handedit what you're doing) everything else I do is done on notepad, so besides layout, I prefer to do things by hand.
am with GG on this one - i work as a web-designer and using dreamweaver saves soooooo much time when setting up the basic layout etc...I'll still go in and tweak the code by hand but the vast majority of layout is done in dreamweaver so i think wysiwyg proggies have their place :)
v_Ln
I too have worked as a webdesigner (aka script-slave). I think its all good as long as you follow a standard.
I allways follow the 4.1 standard, most* coders dont, I dont understand why really... I mean If you write valid HTML you get sooooo much less hazzle. Your customers really likes it and it looks good on paper and ohh, its a standard, follow it why dont ya?
* Not all
I agree with GG in that it can be faster to use Dreamweaver and the like to create a layout, although I've got so used to (and fairly fast at) hand-coding that I just keep a number of CSS templates (and some table-based ones) which I can quickly change the values and colour schemes of and then just drop content in. I suppose it all comes down to what you're used to - I used Netscape Composer for my first site (the good old days of NN4 eh?), and then learnt HTML and hand-coded everything else from scratch after that.
Its all good if u can work with dream weaver and front page and proggies like that, but if you can do the same thing with just html, xml, java, w/e. Theres a certain pride in it that u know it all by knowledge and you don't have a program do the work for you.
I use Frontpage 2.0 for the main layout of my webpages, but everything else I do with notepad. Coding is supposed to be fun so why use WYSIWYG-editors then...
I use good old fasion notepad for most of my work. allthough i have been known to use dream weaver on ocasion.Personlay i dont like front page. dont ask me why cause i dont know. But the purest is the best and i have NEVER seen a wysiwyg editor that didnt throw ina bunch of extra bullcrap code
I started a little over 8 years ago learning HTML by saving pages, opening them in Notepad, and reverse engineering them again to learn how it all worked. Having a through understanding of the code can be very useful. But these days if I am designing a site I will use Dreamweaver out of convenience. While there is the whole pride-in-doing-it-all-yourself thing, using a combination of the features of web development packages with manual coding is much more efficient. I doubt there would be many professional web designers who could get away with totally manually coding their sites. As a customer I wouldn’t accept being charged for something that could have been achieved much quicker with the assistance of a common commercial package.
When I was learning the basics I did cheat by doing the basic page with Composer, but then I would edit out the Netscape garbage with 1stPage. Then I saw how easy it was to script a basic page.
I agree with delta4ce that actually knowing code gives a person a certain pride, i felt that when i actually learned code and stopped using that homestead site editor stuff. But the programs like Dreamweaver do help with making a template a lot faster, so nothing against the people that use the programs and know their stuff.
I always code in raw form, i hate trying to use frontpage and dreamweaver, in fact i'm just graduating and looking for a job in web design, except most say that experience is needed in dreamweaver, it's a right pain in the ass!
It really surprises me the amount of people who don't use Dreamweaver for layout. In my opinion there's nothing wrong with doing it. It's just extra work that you're creating for yourself when you really don't have to. It's my opinion that you should never rely heavily on a WYSIWYG editor, but, like I stated before in my previous post...there's really no point in handcoding image slices when a program can do it for you, faster without any hassle. If you want to waste your time, go for it, but in all honestly...what's the point?
You have to remember that Dreamweaver is pretty expensive though - I certainly can't afford to fork out £100+ for a piece of software. Sure, it might pay for itself in the long run, but that's only of use if you have the money in the first place.Quote:
Originally posted here by GreekGoddess
It really surprises me the amount of people who don't use Dreamweaver for layout. In my opinion there's nothing wrong with doing it. It's just extra work that you're creating for yourself when you really don't have to. It's my opinion that you should never rely heavily on a WYSIWYG editor, but, like I stated before in my previous post...there's really no point in handcoding image slices when a program can do it for you, faster without any hassle. If you want to waste your time, go for it, but in all honestly...what's the point?
Hand-coding things isn't necessarily a waste of time, if you do nothing but handcode (like I do), you can get very fast at it to the point where it just isn't worth purchasing and learning how to use WYSIWYG programs like Dreamweaver. I realised this when I tried using Netscape Composer to create a nested table layout a couple of years back - it was quicker to just write the code myself - that way I knew exactly what was happening. When you have plently of CSS/HTML to copy/paste from (again, like I have set up), it really doesn't take that long to get a site up and running, from which you can tweak the design in the HTML as you see fit.
I won't deny that WYSIWYG editors have improved drastically over the last three years, but they're still not quite as good as hand-coding. It's a bit like the Assembly/C argument - you can still program in assembly and your programs might be slightly smaller and run faster, but now C compilers are so good that there's no need for assembly except at the very lowest level where you *have* to have direct hardware manipulation. I think Quake (the first version) was the last major game where an assembly programmer was asked to optimise the code.
Anyway, I'm digressing a bit here, the main point is: use Dreamweaver, Frontpage et al if you want, but I'll stick with my good old text editors for the time being. :)
Personally, after viewing some personal pages of AO members here, I remember why it is that I don't create webpages, I have absolutly no artistic eye. I cannot do what members like GG have done, and others, but I do know how to write a basic webpage in notepad, and I teach it to 5th and 6th graders. Not so much that they can learn, but so that they can appreciate what the computer industry is, and not take it for granted....
techtech,
Don't knock your "artistic" self. I'm not artistically inclined but the pages I created and maintain for people convey the message to the target. They are plain, uncluttered.
There are some pages out there that are too artistic and fail. When you go to a website to find the date, just the date, of a concert tour and you absolutely have to lave the latest version of Flash so you can glean a month, day and year. And of course the version you downloaded last weeks isn't the latest. I always look for the TEXT version of web pages.
I was teaching Communications merit badge to some Boy Scouts. In order for communication to succeed there has to be a message, medium, sender and receiver. The receiver has to accurately receive the message the sender sent. Sometimes there is no room for art.
What fourdc said reminds me of the Canada First Robotics competition. One part was the development of a website, which I did. It had to be in valid xhtml and you had to have graphic and text-only versions of the site. I spent hours making my site determine the users browser and then making sure both sites were laid out exactly the same and that the text only version was still pretty. The winning teams had sites that were incredible for the graphic versions, but sucked ass when it came to the text-only version. What good is my fancy graphical page if the user is browsing with links or lynx.
As for myself. I do everything in Textpad. I'll do a rough hand sketch of what I want the page to look like and i'll pass it off to my roommate. He'll open Photoshop and create the desired image and send it to me. Then i'll draw a grid on it and send it back to him. He'll cut the grid into the pieces while I code the table or frames to hold the images. He'll send them back and i'll drop them in. Then boom our page is graphically designed. Then I usually use an inline frame to display the page content.
Pretty much dreamweaver for me, can do most things i want by hand, but it will take my 5 times as long
i mainly use dreamweaver for replacing finding and replacing certin things within a document. It also can be useful in coding a layout, but i learned off wordpad when i was 13 (i'm 16 now) and i've become very efficent at coding in html. I can now pretty much code any sort of layout in table format and i've actually done some scripting jobs for my cousin for a couple hundred bucks.
I have made many a website and do all my code by hand. FrontPage is a piece of crap to put it lightly. The code that it generates is so screwed up from a designers stand point. I have taught many clients Dreamweaver as it is way better than FrontPage for editing infromation in one of my designs... Jhollings
i recommend to use any MacroMedia application...
I started making webpages when I was about 13, and the only thing I used was notepad. When I started taking computer classes in highschool, I used notepad. When I learned Perl, I used notepad. When I learned PHP, I used notepad. But as much as I loved notepad, I have pretty much abanded Windows, so now I use emacs or vi. Funfun.
i too use raw html; all my gamer friends use phpnuke, moonfruit, frontpage, and other cheap site makers...
Anybody can make a web page with the editors available, anybody.
Ever look at the code these WYSIWYG editors spew forth? Trash!!!!!!!!
Ever try to recode one of those pages?? You are better off starting from scratch.
I tell people right upfront, I have NO artistic ability at all, but if you draw it I'll write it.
I tried using hot-dog, frontpage, composer, etc. years ago.
I got so disgusted I went to the W3C web site, downloaded the proposed ( at the time ) 3.0 specs, and learned.
I used DomiNOTE for a while ( a great notepad replacement ), then tried DominHTML ( I think I got their new links right, they've changed a couple of times. )
But the real gem in the HTML world ( IMHO ) is ... oh, maybe this is a secret? I am truly surprised it wasn't mentioned yet.
It's HTML-Kit
Now a days all my sites are written in xhtml and css. 99% of the readers don't know the difference, BUT I DO!
I started off useing frontpage a little but nowadays I just use notepad and write my pages from scrap might take a little longer but I feel so proud when I've written it all myself lol.
I use synText editor. Its really good with hightlighting the tabs and attributes. I like actually typing the tabs in instead of using a program like FrontPage or Dreamweaver. HTML was real easy to learn if you just sit down for like an hour or so. I showed an 8 year old HTML so anyone can learn it.