Thanks everyone for your comments. I had read so many negative comments
about Frontpage, and about all web sites created with it looking the
same, which personally I think is ridiculous. I have been using it for
about a month now and also reading up on HTML and CSS. I find Frontpage
great for laying out the basic site, then I move into the code or split
view and edit the HTML by hand. Just wondered if other designers used
this or if there was something I hadn't noticed in the package yet that
meant it was a no go area for professionals.
As I said in my previous post, I'm a comparative newbie at using
FrontPage. My impression of it is that it is designed with beginners in
mind so that even the beginner can produce reasonable-looking sites with
minimum experience.
I've been using it long enough to have points of dissatisfaction, the
main one being that it does produce an awful lot of code which isn't
always as efficient as it might be. Maybe that's the price one has to
pay for things to be made simple. And even in code view, one cannot see
the code for additions like shared borders. Another is that you would
need another program in order to produce your own graphics rather than
use what is in the FP graphics library.
I don't have a great deal of experience in web design even though I
wrote my first web pages back in 1996 using a DOS text editor. They were
essentially very simple pages. I hoped that FrontPage might help me to
produce something a little more sophisticated so I bought a copy of
FP2000 cheaply on Ebay (actually I bought FP2003 to begin with and then
found I couldn't install it over WIN98 so I gave it to my daughter!).
Yes, it did enable me to produce some nicer looking pages but even then
I found it somewhat limiting.
I do have quite a bit of programming experience, albeit amateur (in
assembly language and C, with a smattering of C++), and so I began to
look at Javascript to make my designs more interesting. In fact, what
I'm doing now I could equally well do without using FrontPage, and
instead using a browser and a text editor, together with a few text
books (I have one for Javascript but nothing for HTML). I wondered about
getting a copy of Dreamweaver, but have come to the conclusion that I
shall probably be able to manage to do what I want with what I've got.
In short, you don't actually need programs like FrontPage or Dreamweaver
if you have any programming experience and plenty of time. There are
lots of sites with ideas for routines in Javascript on the Web. If you
haven't a lot of time then those programs are a must if you want to
produce something quickly.
David
