Experts please assist..Web design Query

saffron yellow

Some help please from you techies,

This is not my natural habitat. I'm looking to enhance the design and experience of my own business website. I do have basic understanding of html script and web design, I have losts of ideas but not the time to continue to teach myself 'on the job'. Nothing to dangerous, just enhanced layout and improved client interaction and online forms, etc

It has been suggested that I consider Adobe Dreamweaver to speed up the coding but I have no experience of this software, its cost or capabiliites.

I was wondering if anyone could advise if this is in fact the recommended sofware to consider, and likley costs or where I can even obtain cheaper earlier editions.


Any assistance greatly appreciated.

Placebo

If its not your habitat then i would recommend hiring a professional to redo your websites. Otherwise you will waste time and money.

I had to clean up a newsletter that was made in Dreamweaver the other day, it was awful. Some do use it as a text editor/viewer

but bottom line no piece of software can wave its magic wand.
Photoshop for graphics and simple notepad for coding [or even Dreamweaver]
You can start off with these but it will take you months to produce something half decent.

Try open up the html files and looking at the code, if you know basic scripting then you might be able to tweak a few things?

saffron yellow

Placebo,

I greatly appreciate and value your advise. Photoshop is no problem at all. I am reasonably creative but to date have found the value of external professional input questionable and disapointing as on a number of occcassions they have failed to add anything further to my initial designs bar the coding.


My business model will include continual design of new html pages for different client projects. I am doing this to date by tweaking existing but I am looking for the versitility and speed of software which might do my job alot quicker and my compatible across different browsers.

Any further comments greatly welcomed.

rgds

Placebo

I think the general consensus would then be Dreamweaver.
You can download a 30 day free trial from Adobe.com, and have full use of its functionality.

p

saffron yellow wrote: »

I greatly appreciate and value your advise. Photoshop is no problem at all. I am reasonably creative but to date have found the value of external professional input questionable and disapointing as on a number of occcassions they have failed to add anything further to my initial designs bar the coding.

Sounds like you hired a coder then, rather than a designer.

Liam Byrne

saffron yellow wrote: »

..... to date have found the value of external professional input questionable and disapointing as on a number of occcassions they have failed to add anything further to my initial designs bar the coding.

I'm confused. What "initial designs" did you give them, what did you ask them for, and if you are the Photoshop standard that you are talking about, why did you even hire a designer?

Also bear in mind that part of "design" is getting a "design" to work on multiple screens and browsers, and for fluid-length content, do there's a nice bit of expertise involved to bring a Photoshop file to a real-life working site.

saffron yellow

Liam,

I'm more interested in web page design in terms of HTML layout and capabilities as opposed to perhaps the grahical content - pictures, colours etc. For example, I am currently exploring different features that I want to incorporate, client interaction, web forms, surveys and exploring other similar capabilities. So perhaps my query does relates more to coding.

Like I said, I have a small self learnt knowledge of coding that I want to enhance as its not feasible (unfortunatley) to retain an expert coder on a continual basis. So therefore, just wondering would software like for example dreamweaver be of benefit to my requirements?

Comments greately appreciated.

Liam Byrne

saffron yellow wrote: »

Liam,

I'm more interested in web page design in terms of HTML layout and capabilities as opposed to perhaps the grahical content - pictures, colours etc. For example, I am currently exploring different features that I want to incorporate, client interaction, web forms, surveys and exploring other similar capabilities. So perhaps my query does relates more to coding.

Like I said, I have a small self learnt knowledge of coding that I want to enhance as its not feasible (unfortunatley) to retain an expert coder on a continual basis. So therefore, just wondering would software like for example dreamweaver be of benefit to my requirements?

Comments greately appreciated.

OK - so it's the "structural" design of the page that you're aiming for.

In that case Dreamweaver is of little use to you; its code is multi-purpose, generic and bloated.

You are far better off learning HTML, jQuery & CSS directly, avoiding the need to interpret what Dreamweaver might do, and instead coding exactly what you WANT to do.

cormee

Liam Byrne wrote: »

In that case Dreamweaver is of little use to you; its code is multi-purpose, generic and bloated.

What does that even mean?

OP - I've been using Dreamweaver daily for over ten years, I'm currently using it in an organisation that produces enterprise-level, AAA accessible software for social services in the UK, there is nothing wrong with the code it produces. Used correctly it produces fully standards-compliant, non-bloated fully accessible code.

The only bloating that could possibly occur is if you use the WYSIWYG editor incorrectly, but CSS based designs have made that editor obsolete.

I'd say Dreamweaver is overkill for the job, have a look at CoffeeCup, much easier to use.

Liam Byrne

cormee wrote: »

What does that even mean?

I'd say Dreamweaver is overkill for the job, have a look at CoffeeCup, much easier to use.

All of Dreamweaver's behaviours are implemented via multi-purpose generic functions and so use about 10 times more code than would be required by someone with programming experience using something like jQuery.

Fanny Cradock

Perhaps you are referring to spry menus etc.? I would agree that they are bloated when compared to a pure html/css menu.

Liam Byrne

Fanny Cradock wrote: »

Perhaps you are referring to spry menus etc.? I would agree that they are bloated when compared to a pure html/css menu.

Menus, preloads, rollovers, etc

cormee

Liam Byrne wrote: »

All of Dreamweaver's behaviours are implemented via multi-purpose generic functions and so use about 10 times more code than would be required by someone with programming experience using something like jQuery.

You're writing off Dreamweaver's code as "multi-purpose, generic and bloated" because of a perceived issues with what are essentially plugins/addons?

Liam Byrne

cormee wrote: »

You're writing off Dreamweaver's code as "multi-purpose, generic and bloated" because of a perceived issues with what are essentially plugins/addons?

Where did you get that idea ?

If you use MM_findObj and MM_swapImage and MM_preloadImages then the code is FAR, FAR more bloated than necessary.

If you use a plugin like jQuery INSTEAD of the above, the code is massively simplified.

irishfeller

I used to use Dreamweaver when developing webpages which were table based i.e. the old way of laying out a page. Dreamweaver speeded up the development of these pages as you could just drag and drop elements to where you wanted them on the page...

..now that I have moved to developing pages in DIVS/CSS I find Dreamweaver fairly useless as it doesn't allow WYSIWYG building of pages with CSS.

cormee

Liam Byrne wrote: »

Where did you get that idea ?

If you use MM_findObj and MM_swapImage and MM_preloadImages then the code is FAR, FAR more bloated than necessary.

If you use a plugin like jQuery INSTEAD of the above, the code is massively simplified.

From the following:

In that case Dreamweaver is of little use to you; its code is multi-purpose, generic and bloated.

and

All of Dreamweaver's behaviours are implemented via multi-purpose generic functions and so use about 10 times more code than would be required by someone with programming experience using something like jQuery.

I do use the jQuery framework and I haven't used behaviours in about five years or so. So I find it strange it's being dismissed because of (what I thought was a) little used part of its functionality.

Irishfeller - the WYSIWYG editor's only use in a CSS based design is jumping around the code and maybe (carefully) dragging and dropping code - however there's a hell of a lot more to Dremeweaver than the WYSIWYG editor. Maybe try some tutorials to learn a little more about its capabilities.

Liam Byrne

cormee wrote: »

I do use the jQuery framework and I haven't used behaviours in about five years or so. So I find it strange it's being dismissed because of (what I thought was a) little used part of its functionality.

It is "little (never) used" by experts & professionals for that very reason.

Fanny Cradock

What do experts and pros use? DW has some very useful features such as live/ design view which are very useful for a rough guide.

cormee

Liam Byrne wrote: »

It is "little (never) used" by experts & professionals for that very reason.

I stopped using behaviours because they were never particularly useful, weren't very customisable, were very badly supported by Adobe/Macromedia, they were made redundant by JavaScript frameworks, and last but not least a lot of the behaviours, such as mouseovers on images, are no longer considered best practice.

I still don't think that's a valid reason to write Dreamweaver off though.

And I'll leave it at that!

cormee

Fanny Cradock wrote: »

What do experts and pros use? DW has some very useful features such as live/ design view which are very useful for a rough guide.

I think (correct me if I'm wrong) he's referring to Dreamweaver's behaviours functionality.

Liam Byrne

cormee wrote: »

I stopped using behaviours because they were never particularly useful, weren't very customisable, were very badly supported by Adobe/Macromedia, they were made redundant by JavaScript frameworks, and last but not least a lot of the behaviours, such as mouseovers on images, are no longer considered best practice.

I still don't think that's a valid reason to write Dreamweaver off though.

And I'll leave it at that!

Same here.

And I wasn't writing it off.....just pointing out that it's not as useful in providing stuff for newbies & non-experts as it used to be / seems to be.

S.M.B.

I'd still use it for HTML email development where it can be very useful.