Commercial programs

• There are many good commercial programs for quick web page design

  • Microsoft Frontpage, Netscape Gold…

• cost typically 100-300 USD

• You still have to learn basics of HTML !

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There are several commercial programs for web page design that cost upwards from 300 Swiss francs. The most famous of these are maybe Microsoft FrontPage and Netscape Navigator Gold. These tools enable you to make very good looking pages very quickly. But they also have their downsides. Besides the cost, they also create quite complicated HTML code that looks frigteningly difficult to a beginner. They also simplify things by making certain assumptions about what you “probably” want and when these assumptions then turn out to be not quite what you actually wanted you will have a hard time in forcing the program to do exactly as you like.

Most of us webmasters sometimes use these helpful programs, to create our own template pages that we can then modify. These programs are made to hide the HTML language from the designer person. We do not think that is a good idea but that the webmasters should learn a little about HTMl to be able to edit and simplify the code that programs like FrontPage make.

There are also other kinds of tools for page creation that do not try to hide the HTML but give you buttons and shortcuts so you don’t have to remember the commands. One good and cheap example is “HomeSite” from Allaire Inc, but there are also others like “HotMetal” and “HotDog” that are really productive tools.