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Subject:Re: GoLive vs. Dreamweaver From:David Neeley <dbneeley -at- oddpost -dot- com> To:Chris La Porte <cpldll -at- earthlink -dot- net>, TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 12 Feb 2004 16:22:54 -0800 (PST)
Hi, Chris!
Personally, I would shy away from GoLive because Adobe has become rather fickle about supporting products that don't meet their sales targets. For example, their Flash competitor LiveMotion is no more (although I rather liked it).
Fiddling with Front Page so that it puts out better HTML code because it's "good enough" is not something I'd recommend either. While Macromedia has its own issues, I think it is clear that Dreamweaver is by far the choice of the professionals. Thus, getting up to speed with it would pay dividends for many reasons both for you personally and for your company. Not the least of these advantages is the huge array of extensions that can further make use of your time to maximum advantage.
However, if you do go with Front Page, there are several programs (including a few free ones) that will strip the Front Page HTML of most of the oddities peculiar to Microsoft. One you might look at is 1st Page 2000, http://www.evrsoft.com. (This is a very nice HTML editor focused on the code, by the way, with many bundled niceties such as Javascript bits, HTML reference, etc.).
Another advantage Dreamweaver has for your company is that people it might hire to do web design in the future are more likely to be familiar with Dreamweaver than any other package.
To me, the major competitors for my attention might be some of the newer XML editors rather than GoLive or Front Page.