Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/07/05
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Dreamweaver and GoLive are both high-end professional packages that, in the hands of a skilled user, can enable the rapid creation of cutting-edge web sites with multiple people working on them. If you don't need high-end results, you don't need a high-end tool. By "high end" I mean something with layers, flashouts, dynamic navigation bars, and so forth. I've made thousands of web pages in the past 10 years; I've used every tool there is and I've made lots of pages by hand. Making them by hand is too slow for anything that has any structure to it. I prefer Dreamweaver, and I use it to make most web pages. Dreamweaver and GoLive have different user-interface concepts, and you will feel comfortable with one or the other. My suite of software tools is Dreamweaver 4, Fireworks 4, Photoshop 6, HomeSite 4.5, and LinkBot. If you're only making a few web pages a week, and rarely change them after you make them, and never have person B making changes to a web site made by person A, then making them by hand is as good a way as any. The most tedious parts of making web pages by hand have to do with layer and image sizing and alignment, and if you aren't using sliced layers and hierarchical navigation bars, it's not hard to do by hand. The biggest problem with making web sites by hand is that browsers are very forgiving of mistakes, and people assume that if it looks right, it is right. The HTML needs to obey the rules as well as look right on the screen. It is rare to find a hand-made file that follows the rules and works properly on all browsers. For examples, Anthony's exquisite handmade web pages are almost unviewable in Netscape 4.76 on my Windows 98 PC, but look fine in MSIE. Those two browsers make different default assumptions about what to do when information is missing. Part of what you get in a web-page software tool is relentless cross-platform checking.