Dreamweaver or Frontpage or Plain HTML

[MajorSetback]

I am starting up a home business and will be setting up a web site to
market the software that I will be developing in C++. I was wondering
if I should buy something like Dreamweaver or Frontpage or try to
develop the web pages directly using HTML and a text editor. I have
not had experience building web pages but have had several years
experience in programming in C and C++ and in using LaTeX for document
preparation.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Peter.

[MajorSetback]

David Segall wrote:

If you are a very good computer programmer it is likely that you are
not a very good aesthetic designer so go to http://www.oswd.org/ and
pick one of the free, open source, site templates. Get with the trend
and use the advanced search to ensure that the site you pick uses CSS
and conforms to one of the XHTML standards.
Thanks very much. I will do that.

Now go to
<http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=dreamweaver>
and download the free thirty day trial. Use it to change the site you
downloaded to match your requirements. It includes a perfectly good
text editor and an FTP program which is the minimum requirement to set
up a web site. If, at the end of the thirty days, you find you have
only used the text editor and FTP program then choose something else.
If, like me, you like the way Dreamweaver can edit a site from the
code, pictorial, CSS or even File view buy it. You may even want to
buy it because it provides a one-click way to view your pages in each
of the multiple browsers you should have on your computer or because
it will reformat, validate and check the links on your pages.

Seems like a good compromise.

Thanks,
Peter.

[MajorSetback]

Paul Ding wrote:

People are going to judge you software by the quality of your website.
You don't want a static website; you need something dynamic. A
bulletin board lets your users rave about your product, lets your
users suggest new uses for your product, and provide workarounds for
the, ahem, "features" we all work so hard to avoid. A blog lets your
users feel like they know you personally, and not only do many people
prefer to buy from a friend, even the ones that want to keep an arms'
length from their suppliers will be happy to believe that it's easy to
contact you for support. They worry about buying a product they can't
figure out how to use, with support in Mumbai, complete with such a
heavy accent they can't undestand.
Seems like an excellent idea. I envision that one of the stregths of
my business is that I will be working directly with the clients rather
than having a mydiad of levels of management having endless meeting
with other management and never having time for the customer. I guess
the only problem I anticipate is that competitors can also read the
blogs and get ideas, not only about suggested improvements but also
about the current product.

The rest of what you said is also very helpful and makes a lot of sense
with the caveate that the sowftare I will be producing with, at least
initially, be mainly targeted at research labs in hospitals and
universities. The users would hopefully be visiting the website and
participating in the blogs but the people with the purse strings would
probably not. My competitors would probably be mainly negotiating
prices (which would probably be quite steep) with the people with the
purse strings.

Good luck in your venture!

Thanks very much and thanks very much for your very helpful advice,
Peter.

[Stewart Gordon]

Blinky the Shark wrote:

On Sat, 14 Jan 2006 12:09:51 +0000, Andy Dingley wrote:

On Fri, 13 Jan 2006 09:21:41 -0500, GreyWyvern <sp**@greywyvern.com>
wrote:

http://webtips.dan.info/wysiwyg.html
I took a little time to read that article and it is a *terrible* example
to foist on newbies who want to abandon WYSIWYG obsfucation. It was
written in 1997, and is now horribly out of date.

On a .info domain ?

How do you know it's not a 1997 product that's been moved to an .info
site?

It's neither of those.

It's in a site that was in a .com domain OUAT, and for which a .info
domain was later registered. Read this brief history of Dan's websites:

http://dan.tobias.name/aboutme/thissite.html

Stewart.

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My e-mail is valid but not my primary mailbox. Please keep replies on
the 'group where everyone may benefit.

[Neil Cherry]

On 15 Jan 2006 17:12:09 -0800, Ma**********@excite.com wrote:

Neredbojias wrote:

With neither quill nor qualm, Ma**********@excite.com quothed:

> I am starting up a home business and will be setting up a web site to
> market the software that I will be developing in C++. I was wondering
> if I should buy something like Dreamweaver or Frontpage or try to
> develop the web pages directly using HTML and a text editor.

The latter. Html is simple. Css, which you'll also need, is fairly
simple although there are some issues regarding its efficacy and inter-
browser rendering.

You should be able to make a decent web page within 1-2 weeks. If you
apply yourself, you could be an "expert" in both well within a year.

I started by viewing the source of and "hacking" (-benignly) html email
then diddling with frontpage and being accordingly dissatisfied then
viewing the source of web pages I liked on the Net. The biggest flaw in
my learning-curve was not finding a newsgroup such as this one sooner to
get feedback on which procedures were right and which were not so right
as well as further methods and additional information not encountered in
my other efforts.

That sounds like the way to do it. I have taken that approach with
nroff in the past. Yikes, that probably ages me a bit. :-)

I wish I had Writer Work Bench! ;-)

--
Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry nc*****@linuxha.com
http://www.linuxha.com/ Main site
http://linuxha.blogspot.com/ My HA Blog
http://home.comcast.net/~ncherry/ Backup site