Professional Website Design

Today we surf the Net for so many reasons - checking our bank accounts, blogging, looking up at our favourite e-zines, searching for that unique eastern recipe, studying about our favourite antivirus software from the product website, exploring a list of books before purchasing it from an online store – the list is simply endless. All these are possible due to websites. Websites are the electronic media with which all such activities are carried out over the Net. In the recent years, website designing has become a respectable profession. Website designers conceptualize, plan and design the layout of a website. They place website content obtained from the content writers and ensure smooth navigability. The aesthetic aspect of a site, which draws a visitor and keeps him/her glued to it, is taken care of by the designer. A website designer has to rely on several web technologies like markup languages to give life to a site. Today, there are several website design tools available that make the task of website creation easier.  In this article, we will discuss about two popular website software tools - Microsoft FrontPage, and Adobe Dreamweaver.

Microsoft FrontPage

Let us discuss about Microsoft FrontPage first.  It has the full name Microsoft Office FrontPage. It is a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) HTML editor. You might already be aware that HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the language of the websites and all design tools assist the designer in generating HTML web pages. When we view a web page, our web browser (say, Internet Explorer) reads the HTML pages and renders the content, images, etc. on screen.

Microsoft FrontPage was part of the Microsoft Office suite from 1997 to 2003. Later on, in December 2006, Microsoft FrontPage was replaced by other web layout tools – SharePoint Designer and Microsoft Expression Web.   

There are several advantageous features of FrontPage. You can navigate through your site and see your site content structure. It has built-in features to support HTML, Cascading Style Sheet (CSS – another modern web technology), and JavaScript (partially). If you wish to edit an image while designing your site, you can do so with the bundled Microsoft Image Composer. The designing process is easy. You can access common tools within FrontPage at the click of your mouse. FrontPage is simple to use if you are familiar with using other Office Products. If at any point of time, you wish to change the URL of a page; all links to the page are dynamically changed. In case of web designing on a collaborative basis, a web page can be edited from anywhere in FrontPage with the help of its in-built password security feature. Microsoft FrontPage is supported by high volume clipboard data import facility. You can easily import rich graphics from the web directly into your web page under progress. FrontPage supports web templates with multi-level navigation system. All generic website building necessities like marquee, tables, forms, wide choice of background and foreground colours, and variety of Fonts etc. are available.

Let us also learn about some pitfalls of FrontPage. Beginners sometimes find it difficult to select and use from among so many templates and ready-to-use page layouts. The WYSIWYG feature applies best with Internet Explorer (another Microsoft product). Sites designed with FrontPage may not appear as attractive in Netscape and other non-Microsoft browsers. By default, FrontPage uses fixed width tables. Sometimes designers face problems to display tables with percentage width.

Adobe Dreamweaver

Adobe Dreamweaver is one of the best website designing tools available in the market. Dreamweaver was originally a product of Macromedia and later on became a product of Adobe when Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005. Dreamweaver is available in both Mac and Windows versions.

Apart from HTML, Dreamweaver supports modern web technologies like ASP.NET, ColdFusion, JSP, PHP and even XML. It is also a WYSIWYG tool like FrontPage. In recent editions of Dreamweaver, increased support for CSS has been provided. You can view your in-progress web pages in many browsers provided they are installed in your PC. Dreamweaver has site management facilities also. People without any coding knowledge of JavaScript can utilize its basic features through Dreamweaver’s behaviours panel. Designers edit web pages locally in Dreamweaver and then the files are uploaded to the web server through web protocols like FTP.  One of the most user-friendly features of Dreamweaver is syntax highlighting. Whether you hand code or whether the code is generated at the backend, language syntax is highlighted for easy reading and locating mistakes. This feature is available for a wide range of contemporary web languages. The software allows you to build your own templates and edit multiple pages simultaneously. Pages completed through Dreamweaver, look almost same in Netscape, Opera and Internet Explorer. This is one of the greatest plus points of Dreamweaver in comparison to FrontPage.

There are very few pitfalls of Dreamweaver. One of them is – while working with CSS, if you enter the “style” attribute twice, there is a probability that your web page might not display correctly.

Experts opine that one should start with Frontage, as it suits beginners. Later on, with increased expertise, one should graduate to using Dreamweaver. Serious web designers should rely on Dreamweaver only. Hand coding (without resorting to the WYSIWYG feature entirely) is still the best way to code and maintain web pages.