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What should I buy for creating HTML pages?

rdowns

rdowns

macrumors Penryn
Original poster
Jul 11, 2003
27,397
12,521
First off, I'm Director of Sales and Marketing for my company and not a web designer. We have a full time designer but we use an email service provider (for deliverability and tracking purposes) for our emails and I create the emails for them. Have been using Front Page and would like to start designing on my Mac. Here's a sample of a recent email.

http://sdm3.rm04.net/servlet/MailView?ms=MjgxMTgwS0&r=NzA1NTI1Njg3S0&j=NDYyMjk2NwS2

(pretty nice for a sales guy I think but I can take the criticism)

I also have a promotions web page on our site that I change on a regular basis as well as a few other areas of the site.

I would like to create more sophisticated emails and promotion pages and am leaning towards Dreamweaver. I played with it for about a half hour at the Apple Store and it seems Front Page like in its ease of use although I didn't really create anything. What would you recommend? Remember, my HTML coding knowledge is basic and do not have the time nor desire to become a code jockey.
 
edesignuk said:
Argh! Extended warranty salesman...run, RUN!!!!!!!!!
Click to expand...

yeah, I know. It's why I turned the job down three times before taking it. My company is really the exception in that industry. We really pay claims and have an outstanding record.

Back on topic, any recommendations?
 
Dreamweaver is pretty nice, it give you a lot of options, I've met some people for whom dreamweaver is overkilled application and finishing coding in Mozilla :rolleyes: but maybe it's not your case and you can impress more with the time. Still some people think golive is better but that's a matter of taste...
 
i always liked dreamweaver, it can seem to be simple and but very powerful,

i also liked golive but since the latest CS version it has really gone down hill.

highly reccomend dreamweaver or get your hands dirty and use bbedit! the good old way! :p
 
Dreamweaver is definitely the way to go. It's not quite as easy as frontpage, but given the types of stuff you've created already I doubt you'll have much trouble adapting.
 
Dreamweaver is extremely unstable and slow. It is, however, one of the few wysisyg editors for the mac (the other being adobe GoLive). Being a photoshop junky I thought I would prefer golive, but dreamweaver is mroe to my liking. As a previous poster suggested though this really is just a matter of taste.

If you really want an application where you never look at code then dreamweaver or golive are the way to go. But before you take the plunge with one of those take a look at some of the free and cheap shareware options that while lacking in wysisyg capabilities are actually much better apps. Some suggestions (there are tons of these kinds of apps) are:
Creatext (my current application of choice)
CSSEdit
SeeEdit

Head on over to www.macupdate.com and do a few searches for text editors, html editors, xhtml editors, css editors, wysiswg editors and read the reviews and download the apps and see what types of apps float your boat. With apple's introduction of webkit it has made cheap shareware apps with preview capabilities pretty easy to code and we have seen an explosion in applications like this. You may find the cheaper alternatives are actually more suited to your tastes.
 
From Overkill to Underkill

Your e-mail looks pretty good!

I tend to work directly in the code, myself. What I do is pretty basic, and I like the control it gives me.

However, I did audit a Dreamweaver class just to see what it was like. I reeeeally didn't like it. Then again, I know people who swear by it. Maybe it just takes having the time to "play" with it to get full control over it.

Anywho - it looks like you're just producing a basic table with either images or text inside. Dreamweaver might be overkill for that. I'm going to toss out a suggestion that will probably be immediately labeled "underkill", but it gives you something else to look at.

Our good friend AppleWorks. If you work within a Word Processing document, you can make a table, put all of your stuff in, format it how you want, and have AW convert it to HTML for you. Make sure to save the original as an AW document, and you can quickly make changes and convert it again should a price change or something.

You might not want to use it for the actual web page you do (since you can't put in mouseover effects), but I'd definitely look at it as an easy way to produce those e-mail pages.

Then again, I'm a Claris Junkie. ;)
 
I agree with everyone else and suggest Dreamweaver. If your really feeling like going all out though get the whole Studio MX 2004 package and see what you can do. Fireworks is a great accessory to Dreamweaver in that it is very easy to make Javascript things like drop down menus and so on. It just all depends on how deep you want to get. Good luck
 
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