 Spinning Webs Making your presence felt on the Web is more essential now than ever. Whether you're an HTML guru or the concept of programming terrifies you, there are tools to help you build a Web site that will stand out. APC looks at the two best tools to get you on the Web. By Alex Kidman and Josh
Mehlman |
|
| Macromedia Dreamweaver 2.0 | |||||
| Dreamweaver is the Web tool of choice for APC's reviewers and Web site staff, and it's not hard to see why. Nothing can rival Dreamweaver for sheer power. On the other hand, Dreamweaver has few pre-prepared elements, so you will need to do more work to make pretty pages than you would using Fusion or FrontPage. Dreamweaver's interface draws a lot from Macromedia's multimedia and graphics heritage. Like Adobe GoLive, it has objects you can drag from palettes to the Web page, and a series of palettes to adjust the settings of the object you're working on. The properties palette is the most comprehensive and powerful of all the products we reviewed. There are also palettes to adjust frames, layers, behaviours and more. You end up having quite a few palettes open at the same time, but they're extremely powerful because they allow you to adjust multiple objects, frames, layers or behaviours at the same time. It was the only package we saw that could handle complicated concepts like performing actions across different frames on the same page, and one of only a few that allowed you to edit pages within a frameset. In our sample Web site, Dreamweaver produced very tight, clean code and had no trouble importing Web sites, including those with JavaScript. The Windows version uses a very Mac-style interface. Unlike many of the packages we reviewed, Dreamweaver's palettes all float above the page, and can't be docked to the sides of the window. Things get a little cluttered unless you work at a resolution of at least 1,024 by 768, and it can be a little confusing at first. Dreamweaver's colour selection tools are well designed. A large palette of colours pops up from the control palette, and you can drag colours to whichever object you want to adjust. There's also an eyedropper tool to match colours from graphics or other parts of the page. | |||||
|
Download the version for your operating system
here:
|
||||
| Requirements: | 30-day trial | ||||
| Install instructions: | Internet Explorer users just click on the file and choose Open to run the setup program straight from the CD. Nestcape users download to your local drive and run the EXE file. | ||||
 Links online: |
http://www.macromedia.com/ | ||||
| Microsoft FrontPage 2000 | |||||
| FrontPage has something of a mixed reputation. Coders tend to hate it with a passion, but it also has a large crowd of devotees who enjoy its simple graphical interface and interoperability with other Microsoft Office products. FrontPage 2000 ships with the premium version of Office 2000, and it's this version APC had the opportunity to assess. It looks as though little has changed on the coding front in this latest version of FrontPage. FrontPage still writes pretty horrible code, which at times seems to work despite itself. FrontPage code works better in IE than Netscape, although the differences were slight. Where the code bloat was more worrying was in the extra size it generated -- the test site created under FrontPage was a good 35% to 40% larger than the other test sites created. The flip side of this is that Microsoft has gone all out to include many features in FrontPage, and automate them as much as possible. Thankfully, FrontPage 2000 includes the site and page editing views in the same screen, rather than having them irritatingly separate as previous versions did. FrontPage handles standard HTML elements with ease, and, to the joy of some, uses the standard Office interface to do it. This gives it an immediate accessibility, although its interoperability with other Office products isn't as impressive as it once was; a lot of products now include Word and Excel file filters as standard. All this feature inclusion does have its downside, as it can become something of a chore to work through menus to find specific features, not to mention some are grouped in an odd fashion. As an example, you can select frame resizing and scrollbars through one menu, but must go through to another separate preferences menu for frame borders. For those interesting in lifting code, FrontPage will accept pasted code directly from IE, but not Netscape. FrontPage is a good editor for anyone who doesn't care much about background details, although code junkies will be alternately bemused and horrified by how FrontPage renders its code. Considering the features it has, it's the best HTML editor you can get in its price range. | |||||
|
Click on the following link and run the
installation program:
|
||||
| Requirements: | Demo | ||||
| Install instructions: | The setup.exe file must be run directly from the CD. Click on the link above and choose Open or Run from current location. | ||||
| Links online: |
http://www.microsoft.com | ||||
⌐ Australian Consolidated Press 1999. All rights reserved.
