What the best way to build sites?

[rande]

I have been using Dreamweaver CS3 and just found out about iweb.

iweb seems real easy.

What are the pros and cons.

Is there a better easier way.

Are they interchangeable? Can I take existing pages and get them

into iweb or build them in iweb quickly then take into Dreamweaver?

thanks

[falkencreative]

Realistically... I tend to think that the "best way to build a site" involves the skill of the coder and how well they know the language, not necessarily the program they use to do it. In my opinion, the "best way" would be to use a text-only editor and actually understand every line of code you are writing, rather than something that does the coding for you, like Dreamweaver or iWeb.

 

As far as your iWeb question, I'm not all that familiar with it -- it is something you would need to experiment with. Websites all use the same basic underlying code, so my impression is that you could probably take sites that you created in iWeb and edit them in Dreamweaver. I'm not sure it goes the other way though -- iWeb is very dependent on templates, and the focus is definitely on the WYSIWYG features, rather than code editing, so I doubt that iWeb would be the best tool to edit pre-existing sites.

 

The whole point of iWeb is to make it easy to put together a basic website. It's target market is usually people who have no previous web experience, and want to be able to share family photos with friends, or have a basic blog to share about their lives. If you want something quick and basic, it's a good fit. However, if you want a custom design (not based on one of their templates) or want to understand the code that creates the site, it probably isn't the way to go. iWeb isn't really used by web design professionals.

[rande]

I studied the codes for awhile and gave up on it.

I've done some print production and alittle design in the last 20 yrs and

would like to just build pages like that.

Isn't it quicker and easier to drag and size in design mode than to write the code for everything when you can.

I do tweak the codes to get things to work.

[falkencreative]

I've done some print production and alittle design in the last 20 yrs and

would like to just build pages like that.

Isn't it quicker and easier to drag and size in design mode than to write the code for everything when you can.

Depends. I find hand coding is way faster for me than having Dreamweaver do it for me. At first using design mode may seem quicker and easier... until you realize that you are getting errors with the way things are displaying, or that Dreamweaver is putting a lot of unnecessary junk code in that makes it difficult to edit the site later.