New Replacement for Microsoft FrontPage!

Posted by Matt - December 1, 2006 on 1:03 pm | In Programming Languages, Web Design, XHTML and CSS |

There are many different web design software packages that can be used to develop websites. I have used or at least tried almost all of them. One that I have used, but always felt it lacked some necessary “professional” features was Microsoft Frontpage 2003.

Microsoft has replaced Frontpage…. with a much better product!

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007

Today is the first day I have been able to experiment with and test out the features of Sharepoint Designer 2007… but it seems to fix many of the issues of Frontpage.

  • The raw code produced seems to be more standards based and better quality.
  • It is much easier to work with CSS and have a site based on Cascading Style Sheets.
  • Many more features, especially .net application development and Sharepoint site development.

How does it compare to the latest version of Dreamweaver 8? Which product I would use depends upon two main issues:

  • Do I need to design a website for a Microsoft Web Server?
  • Do I need to use .net technology instead of PHP?

Since Microsoft produced Sharepoint Designer, they of course want to promote their own development languages and technologies - which include of course the .net/asp applications and technologies. If you need to develop a website for a Microsoft Server using .net…. it is much easier to use Sharepoint Designer rather than Dreamweaver 8. 

Since the majority of web servers on the Internet are Linux based (and can’t use .net/asp applications) you will be more limited in many circumstances. Dreamweaver has much better PHP support (especially with Interakt extensions) and PHP is available on almost all webhosting packages.

Sharepoint Designer 2007 also does not have the new “ribbon” that the other new Office products have, but it seems fairly intuitive to use.

Well…. I need to go play with my new toy… and learn some more .net/asp while I’m at it!

Matthew

 


No Comments yet »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

XHTML: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>