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Elodie Lu

Ch. 6 Assignment
10256
17 July 2010

Creating a Web Page


To create a web page, you need a web editor. As the Production Manager of Metamorphosis Design Studio, Oleg Lazarenko, puts it, “There are two major WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web page editors available for beginners: Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver. So the question is which one is better?” While he is not a fan of neither, they are both very popular with his customers and each has it’s advantages and disadvantages (Lazarenko).

FrontPage is ideal for beginners because it has many ready-made templates (Lazarenko). It also has ready to use web authoring solutions (Lazarenko). In addition, it works well with other Microsoft applications, so you can easily copy and paste things onto your web page, such as an Excel chart (Lazarenko). 

However, FrontPage uses tables that have fixed widths which cannot be adjusted (Lazarenko). It is not very “flexible” with design and coding (Lazarenko). Also, its page formatting only works well with Internet Explorer (Lazarenko). 

Then there’s Dreamweaver, which a more experienced user may like (Lazarenko). With Dreamweaver, you can start with one of their templates and modify it to your liking (Lazarenko). You can create your own templates altogether (Lazarenko). It is very flexible when it comes to design and coding (Lazarenko).

Dreamweaver is not as easy to use as FrontPage, where it provides you with helpful advice and lots of templates (Lazarenko). It can be complicated and difficult to use (Lazarenko). Pages built from complex templates sometimes become corrupt during use and must be rebuilt and the html code usually needs to be touched up by hand after making several subsequent changes in the design view (Lazarenko).

Another option is PageBreeze. It is very similar to Dreamweaver, using similar tools to manage tables (Green). You can design your own templates with it and the visual editor works very well, even better than Dreamweaver (Green). As Roedy Green of Canadian Mind Products claims, “It is almost like using a word processor.”

The problem with PageBreeze is that it has a lot of kinks, like “weird syntax highlighting, making text red for no apparent reason” and tending “to salt your text with unwanted  s that you have to manually convert back to spaces” (Green).  It also does not support the mousewheel to scroll. Plus, when you select a word, it includes the surrounding quotes (Green). In short, PageBreeze can be very eccentric and annoying (Green).