Mt first Website..

I'm not a web designer by any margin but I know how to do the basics and maintain my own site. However I use golive more than dreamweaver (I can manage the basics on this) because to me anyway the golive interface is more intuitive due to coming from a photoshop background. Plus in my opinion golive appears to be more design orientated in its approach to making a website and as I have no interest in the efficiency of the code (if it works on all the main browsers then I'm a happy chappy :D) it suits me fine.

Now it might be worth the op (assuming this urge for web design is for personal pleasure) looking at golive as an alternative.
 
LazyManc said:
It's very difficult for a WYSIWYG editor to build clean code when it has no idea of what the final design is going to look like when you first start editing the page - hence you get left with extraneous markup.
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This is true to an extent and I see where you are coming from on that.

However, once a DW coded site is completed and uploaded, bang it through the W3C Validator and then use HTML Tidy to clean the code up.

Voila......W3C Validated code. :cool:

I know it's not quite as simple as that, but for the OP's needs, it's an option. ;)

That said, this is good advice:-

houndster said:
Dreamweaver is not like Photoshop in that the more you play with it the more you learn.
You will need to learn what the code is doing, learn the tags etc. You really don't need Dreamweaver anyway, a simple text pad will do the job just as well.
HTML is the easiest language to learn. My advice would be to play around with tagging paragraphs of text up and styling them in various ways with CSS, you'll be suprised how easy it is :)
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Combining DW and a good bit of knowledge/tutorials on CSS and HTML pretty much go hand in hand.

Dreamweaver will happliy do the legwork for you, but looking at it in code view and knowing what you are actually looking at, helps immensely.
 
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SiriusB said:
XHTML - http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/default.asp

CSS - http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp
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A very good site, I learnt most of my XHTML/CSS from this site. :)

Eriedor said:
www.htmldog.com

For css and html reference.
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Also very good. Slightly easier to navigate and find what I'm looking for.

SiriusB said:
CSS is the one that will have you scratching your head and swearing at things :D

Easy to learn, bloody hard to master.
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Too true! :D XHTML is as easy as pie. CSS is the hard bit. As SiriusB says easy to start off with but when you want/need to get more complicated then its quite teasingly hard! And yes I swore a bit. :D

I've found creating valid XHTML so unbelievably easy it wasn't true. The W3C validator is pretty good and shows you what bit is wrong so you should be able to fix it. Creating valid CSS is also fairly easy I've found BUT there is some stupid angle to the W3C css validator where it gives you warnings for silly little things. How silly? Well even the css file for the W3C css validator page has these warnings in! :D
 
Its true what they say about CSS it can be a little fiddly and frustrating, but once you have done a few websites you can basically have a few templates and reuse them and just tweak them a bit for websites in the future. XHTML is as easy as it gets.

I personally use plain simple wordpad/notepad. I have used dreamweaver and frontpage before but found I just could not get things placed exactly and was a hinderance to me personally. I also use notepad because every computer has notepad/wordpad and if I'm down at a friends house or anywhere and I'm asked to to a quick page the computer im sitting at doesn't need to have any expensive software. I whip out notepad :p I can even do it on my iPhone :D

The W3C sites are really good sites to learn from and also good for reference if you cant remember that bit of CSS.
 
Draeger said:
Combining DW and a good bit of knowledge/tutorials on CSS and HTML pretty much go hand in hand.

Dreamweaver will happliy do the legwork for you, but looking at it in code view and knowing what you are actually looking at, helps immensely.
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I'd say this is pretty much essential. CSS support in browsers is still too quirky to always have the expected result, especially once you start getting into complex layouts. If all you know is design view, then as soon as you hit your first snag you're basically in no-mans-land with no idea of how to approach fixing it.

DW design view is still not a 100% accurate (how can it be when browsers render differently?) so you still need to use the actual browsers for testing. I guess it's useful for quickly knocking up pages but with a decent editor with code suggestion/completion then I doubt it's considerably faster.

My main problem with DW is the cost - it's got a really nice code editor and project handling tools but then so have loads of other far cheaper or free IDEs. Personally I think the design view is more of a crutch than anything, although maybe my view has been coloured somewhat by the old versions, I haven't really played too much with the new one.
 
I personally use plain simple wordpad/notepad.
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Ick... Wordpad really isn't suitable at all for source editing, as it defaults to saving rich text if I'm not mistaken?

Notpad isn't much better tbh, and should only be used as a last resort - there are so many free editors out there, why handicap yourself? At the bare minimum you should use an editor with line numbering, proper newline support and preferably syntax colouring.

Not having a go, clearly it's down to personal taste, but at least try one or more of the following and see if you still want to go back :):
Free: notepad++, sciTE, Crimson editor
Peanuts: Textpad, Editpad pro, e text editor (Windows copy of Mac's excellent textmate)
 
In general, I've always found wysiwyg apps quite good - going back to frontpage on win 98!

However, I still use a freeware program called spiderpad for hand coding*

*havent done it for ageeees though!

Worth a look :)
 
LazyManc said:
Ick... Wordpad really isn't suitable at all for source editing, as it defaults to saving rich text if I'm not mistaken?

Notpad isn't much better tbh, and should only be used as a last resort - there are so many free editors out there, why handicap yourself? At the bare minimum you should use an editor with line numbering, proper newline support and preferably syntax colouring.

Not having a go, clearly it's down to personal taste, but at least try one or more of the following and see if you still want to go back :):
Free: notepad++, sciTE, Crimson editor
Peanuts: Textpad, Editpad pro, e text editor (Windows copy of Mac's excellent textmate)
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I do use Notepad++ when doing PHP at home normally because of the line numbering, would be forever counting lines in notepad lol :p. Anywhere else like in Uni I would use notepad because they try to get people to use Visual Studio which I hate and I find slugish.
 
Steer clear of Frontpage - whilst it may be easier for beginners, you'll never produce proper code or websites as long as you're using it.

DW is great imo. Whilst I don't use the design view, I love using it to code websites as it takes a lot of the hard work out for you, and enables you to easily check things etc. It's also great for first of all creating templates, then making the pages of a site from the template. When you do this, any changes you make to the template (i.e. update a link, change an image etc) will automatically make the changes to pages created from that template :)

However, it can be a little tricky to get used to and to get the best from it requires some knowledge of coding. There are some good books available which will give you good background in html/xhtml/css and will introduce you to the different versions of each.

The W3 Schools website is great too :)
 
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