Best Web Develpoment Application

[mwaraitch]

Hello,
I have been working with dream weaver for years now for developments. Other day I found the webbuilder and web page maker. I find that these are good applications for faster development. Make development really simple and easy.
Any ideas of similar applications.
Regards

[Turbine]

This is a subjective topic. Right off the bat Dreamweaver CS3 is the strongest contender out there right now for WYSIWYG editors. There is a reason it is the favorite editor out there. If you haven't upgraded to CS3 I would highly suggest it as soon as possible.

Now, moving on: It depends on the situation you're in. If you do NOT know anything about coding, markup, or any of that and an editor's zero-coding functionality is of serious concern, there are specific programs out there that make it almost effortless to produce a site, but what you have is an often duplicated and non-original work. Dreamweaver has always blended the ease of use of a WYSIWYG with the complexity of an actual editing platform.

A big thing you should incorporate into your arsenal of tools is, believe it or not, Photoshop. Photoshop is capable of exporting images as a .html and delivering you the layout. That basically means you can make one big image, slice it up, and turn it into a website through dreamweaver! It's very useful for making very unique and custom designs.

If you're thinking about ditching dreamweaver for something else, I'd say stick with it and continue your learning. Learn all of the functions of DW and make sure you put them to use! I know a few designers that don't even bother to use the built-in FTP functions that DW has and it makes design so much better! Make sure to use all the tools before you ditch the platform.

Remember, faster development is situational. If you're in a rapid deployment situation you might as well spend 60 dollars on a template and run with that, but when it comes to webdesign and productivity, you can only move so fast before you start shooting yourself in the foot by cutting corners. The program you linked seemed to be more focused on ease-of-use than anything else, and I'm getting the idea that you haven't invested much time to learn the code you're working with, so I'll tell you this: You need to learn your language. At least a little! You need to have a little grasp on the language you're working with, otherwise you're going to have a hard time developing.

In closing, like I said, stick with DW! Upgrade if you don't have CS3 and GIVE IT TIME! It is a good program.

-Turbine.

[Dan Williamson]

Another great post Turbine. I would say that Adobe Dreamweaver would be very beneficial to learn as it's generally an industry standard to use, it has some amazing features and tricks, for example you can easily manage your website and databases. I personally do not use Dreamweaver much, but I am knowledgable in the program, this is merely because it's used a lot in industry.

Turbine says that you need to learn the language that you are working with a bit, but I disagree with that, with Dreamweaver you can use the WYSIWYG editor, but this can lead to many problems in compatibility and usability, so I would at least learn how HTML and if you use it CSS works, make sure that you understand the language in which you are coding in, whether it be a markup language to a high-level programming language.

I'm going to use my own experience here, when I first learned programming I didn't use an IDE or a GUI, I learnt to use the Command Line to code things, such as small programs and such and then once I had learnt enough to be going on with I started with IDE's and GUI's.

My point in that would be that you could learn to use HTML in Notepad or Notepad++ if you want things like syntax highlighting which helps error-handling or just use the Dreamweaver Code View but you're best with learning the language first.

You ask for the best website development application, yet it is un-answerable, it is all opinionated, it's like the Macintosh VS PC, Photoshop VS Paint Shop Pro. Dreamweaver has advantages such as WYSIWYG editor, code view, managing databases, files, websites etc and it has a wide user support, whereas Notepad or something has only code view, yet is used by some of the greatest coders that don't need Dreamweaver's features.

All in all I would read up on a few Development Applications, and perhaps download trials in them, but I wouldn't purchase Adobe Dreamweaver unless you are going to use it properly.

[mwaraitch]

Thanks for useful inputs. I never wanted to undermine dreamweaver, in fact I find it as mainstay of my development since many years. Its acts as base for all the development effort. Yet at times, there are some fast track development needed where one need to save time on relatively simpler work and such applications as the one I mentioned and another like xara when coupled with dreamweaver make things go faster as well as smooth.

[zelphics]

I really like Microsoft Expression web better than adobe dreamweaver (even though i used them both)

its much easier in my opinion to make your site look the same in all browsers using expression web.

[Boogle]

Originally Posted by Turbine

...
A big thing you should incorporate into your arsenal of tools is, believe it or not, Photoshop. Photoshop is capable of exporting images as a .html and delivering you the layout. That basically means you can make one big image, slice it up, and turn it into a website through dreamweaver! It's very useful for making very unique and custom designs...
-Turbine.

Very good post, Turbine but could I just say that, although slicing is easy and the most inept user could make use of it... please don't? It's a very poor way of designing for various reasons, which are: (of course this is oly my opinion )

1. It slices it all up into tables, which if you've made your full page from is a very poor way to design layouts nowadays and also tables are slow to render.

2. If you do a poor job of the slicing, which am ametuer could do: photoshop inserts stupid spacer images, as for which firefox, opera and safar DO NOT render. Thus your nicely laid out side becomes a messed-up jigsaw!

3. It's not SEO friendly: basically if all your text is an image how can spider bots read it? I know you can use the longdesc attribute of the <img></img> tag, however this is a long-drawn out job.

4. When it comes to modifiying anything, i.e. the text, the images, the size, etc. You have to go into photoshop, re-do the image, re-slice it where necessary and then re-load the whole design into the HTML again, which is about the slowest form of maintenance ever!

Don't get me wrong, i like the slice tool but only for small stuff every now and again that would make life a little easier or make something look nicer: designing full layouts using this is a bad idea and AFAIK, the layout can only be converted into DIVs manually, which would be a ball-ache man!

That's just my guys anyway,

cheers,
Boog's

[mwaraitch]

Originally Posted by zelphics

I really like Microsoft Expression web better than adobe dreamweaver (even though i used them both)

its much easier in my opinion to make your site look the same in all browsers using expression web.

I think when we get used to any decent application which seems good enough for level of our work we do not like to change that. May be thats one reason that I would not like to change to expression web despite hearing from you. It takes considerable effort to get accustomed to new application and that can only be done if there are considerably strong reasons for it.

[Foxtrck]

Best Web development application = Notepad++

[mwaraitch]

Originally Posted by Foxtrck

Best Web development application = Notepad++

Gives impression of notepad though

[Foxtrck]

Originally Posted by mwaraitch

Gives impression of notepad though

It is Notepad with specialised IDE's for nearly every programming language. Can't be doing with GUI's don't learn anything that way.

[Costin Trifan]

Originally Posted by Foxtrck

Best Web development application = Notepad++

buddy, if you state that ^^ in a public forum, you must be out of your mind... (no offense, please)

you should have added at least the "IMO"...

[Foxtrck]

Best Web development application IMHO = Notepad++

You can argue with that choice of course, but in any educational institute you'll be advised to stay away from thngs like dreamweaver unless your doing multimedia and don't rely on coding. Although I am just talking about low level development here, in a professional setting obviously you don't just use notepad. Different people develop in different ways and theres nothing wrong with any way, just go with what suits your style and knowledge/ability.

[mwaraitch]

Originally Posted by Foxtrck

It is Notepad with specialised IDE's for nearly every programming language. Can't be doing with GUI's don't learn anything that way.

I C, interesting. I thought we could use normal notepad for writing a language. Could we put it in category or development tools. One would tend to think some thing like frontpage, dreamweaver and similar for web development, yet you may be right, at the end of the day we are putting together script. I am bit confused, do we really have a way to classify these things.

[ToddW]

Originally Posted by Foxtrck

Best Web development application IMHO = Notepad++

You can argue with that choice of course, but in any educational institute you'll be advised to stay away from thngs like dreamweaver unless your doing multimedia and don't rely on coding. Although I am just talking about low level development here, in a professional setting obviously you don't just use notepad. Different people develop in different ways and theres nothing wrong with any way, just go with what suits your style and knowledge/ability.

I program.
I use dreamweaver.
I don't rely on the GUI, any real programmer wont either.

I still find dreamweaver loads easier, with tons more options, and it helps me code, and integrate with designs a LOT easier than anything else I've ever tried.

The features are just amazing, especially in CS3.

[hasan_889]

I've been using Dreamweaver for years, it's very helpful when I'm designing a webpage. But when I'm writing PHP code, I use PHPEdit, I found this IDE very helpful for PHP programmers.

You can have a free license from waterproof.fr explaining that you are learning php and you are not going to use it as commercial basis.

[ericajoieake]

I've been working using dreamweaver for more than two years and I could say dreamweaver is the best application for building websites!

[Tim_4_TC]

i would say, its dreamweaver....