• FrontPage was a beginner tool, that professional web designers shunned.
• Adobe Dreamweaver is the defacto tool for professionals.
• Company Intranets became more critical to businesses, and yet most businesspeople are not web designers. So it made sense to make FrontPage into something even easier to use for web design newbies.
• Due to the last point, FrontPage because the built-in authoring tool for Microsoft Sharepoint (Microsoft’s limited Intranet product).
• Professional web site design requires tools that generate standards-based code, which FrontPage could not do.

Microsoft replaces FrontPage with “Expression Web”
For users that wish to build a web site, and who don’t need a basic corporate file-sharing Intranet like Sharepoint, Microsoft created a replacement tool for FrontPage called “Expression Web”. So far, it appears that this new program has been a colossal failure. Why do I say that? Because no one (and I do mean no one) asks for it. Back in the day, folks would go to Staples or their local office store and purchase FrontPage so that they could put up a web page quickly. Those days are gone. Those that need nothing more than an extremely basic web presence today can use online page-building tools to generate simple template-based web pages quickly.

More about template sites
Template sites built through a web interface have widened the divide between building a basic web presence, and building a professional web site. This divide means that it is both easier than ever to build a web site, and it is also harder than ever to build a web site. It all depends on what you call a “web site”. Domain registrars make a killing selling those template sites, and yet they really are hideous to look at. Superpages web sites that you can buy from the local phone book are also just as bad, and they fall into the template category. I stopped trying to talk first-time web site owners out of those template sites a long time ago, because if a quick and dirty web presence is all they feel that they need, then it will take a year or two of enduring zero business from the web before those web site owners smarten up and purchase professional web services from a firm like mine (Delaware.net). In a strange way, those template sites actually gain us customers because they serve to educate future customers of the value of a custom web site. Features like search engine optimization (making your site come up in Google) are sorely missing from template sites, and more web savvy customers realize very quickly that their template site is under-performing and is actually costing them money.

Web Video Overtakes Microsoft – Microsoft Responds
With the wild popularity of video on the web, thanks to sites like YouTube, Microsoft has been left behind in this important era of the web. Since Microsoft’s arch-enemy is Google, and Google bought YouTube, the situation has looked even worse for Microsoft. This is another reason why FrontPage went away. For example, you can’t even VIEW the web site for Expression Web without installing a “Microsoft Silverlight” plugin into your browser. What the hell is Silverlight? It is Microsoft’s attempt to complete with Adobe Flash – the web’s standard video player. Once Adobe got Flash to play video, it put another nail into Microsoft’s Media player (my least favorite video player). For Microsoft to get adoption of SilverLight, they have tied it very closely with ExpressionWeb.

If you still use FrontPage, its decision time
Since FrontPage is going away, you are going to need to get a new tool for building web sites. If a low-tech tool for a simple web site is what you want, then I would use Adobe Contribute, which is an easy to use tool for Creating simple web pages and Intranet content. Several licenses of Contribute can allow a small team to create a static Intranet that is a good start for having a basic Intranet. If you want to build web pages for a living, or if you are learning web design in college, then you need to start using Dreamweaver, Adobe design products (Photoshop, Illustrator), and Microsoft Visual Studio. Those are the tools that the pros use.

Lastly, there are other alternatives and hyrbids to all of these choices. It is now possible to have a web site designed fairly inexpensively, which can also have robust applications to help your business run. At Delaware.Net, we have many of these applications ready to install in your web site – like calendars, e-commerce, signup forms, file management, and more. If you have a site built in FrontPage, we can help you to come up with a newer, better way to manage and improve your web site.

Do I hate Microsoft?
No. We have a lot of Microsoft servers in our data center, and we are adding more every month. Most of the workstations in our office also run Windows, with the exception of some graphic design workstations that are Macs. But when it comes to the web, web authoring, or Microsoft’s attempt to compete with Flash, they don’t have a chance. Even their Internet Exploder (Explorer) browser is a CONSTANT headache for web designers because it is not standards-compliant. So how are we supposed to believe that MS will make their developer tools compliant, when their web browser isn’t? The answer is that they won’t. You can see the frustration of web developers over Internet Explorer in an article that Computer World just released, and if you read the second part of it you can see how much hassle IE causes developers. Every chance I get, I try to encourage customers to use Firefox instead of IE.

Screenshot and link after the jump.

Here is the link to the screenshot. Link to the live site is below.

http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/

Pretty neat.

The examples in my presentation included AJAX, ColdFusion 8 tags, Spry widgets, and more. I demonstrated how we are using these technologies in current web projects, and I also spent some time explaining how we win projects, how we manage them, and how we bill for them. Typically this is an area most web development shops don’t like to talk about, but we don’t have any secrets in this regard.

I demonstrated a couple of Delaware.Net’s latest on-demand applications, including our AJAX-powered email newsletter management program called Mail-Logic. During my first web design presentation with Adobe, there were a ton of Q&A questions about our web-based project management system that we use to help us manage our projects. With this presentation, I got into a little more depth on how we use this tool to manage over 100 projects successfully. That system is called Team-Logic, and yes, we do sell it.

A lot of folks sent me emails after this last presentation asking me about the CSS design resource links that I mentioned in the presentation. If you would like a copy of those, shoot me an email and I will send them to you. Sign up for this blog and I will send an alert when the on-demand version of the presentation is also available.

One last thing – the Adobe Acrobat Connect product that Adobe let me use for the webinar is straightup AWESOME. I highly recommend this product for giving webinars.

There were over 1,000 attendees watching the presentation who had lots of questions about the project. I demonstrated how we build the new web site and how we managed the project from beginning to end, from prototyping the design, through using our Team-Logic CRM system for managing the project, to integrating AJAX and building mass-eMail eCards using Flash.

The presentation was delivered over the web using Acrobat Connect Pro (formerly Breeze), and I really liked the interface and the performance of it. There were about 5 Adobe employees who helped me with giving the presentation, and we did a trial run of the presentation last week. I couldn’t have done the presentation with out their help (Thanks Adobe!) This was my first time using Adobe Connect for a webinar, and I must say that I am very impressed with it as a webinar tool. The VOIP quality and desktop-sharing worked without a hitch. I am running dual 23″ monitors on Vista, and it still ran great with no issues.

I answered close to 30 questions from attendees, and I still did not get to answer every question that was asked. There were a lot of questions about our Team-Logic project management system, and other questions about what CMS systems we recommend for small web sites. If you attended the seminar and you still have a question about it, feel free to post a reply to this thread and I will answer it.. All comments on this blog are moderated, so I will have to answer your question before you can see it posted here on my blog.

Once again, I would like to thank Adobe for the opportunity to share how we build web sites and how we use Adobe tools for our work. I hope to do more presentations for Adobe in the future for some of their other products that we use, including ColdFusion, Illustrator, Photoshop, and more.
The presentation should be available next week to watch after they have edited it and uploaded it. I also posted a PDF of the presentation here with this post. The link at the top of the article should forward you to a copy of the webinar once they post it.

• Spry AJAX implementation
  We have been experimenting we different AJAX libraries, including Prototype, script.aculo.us, and Spry. All of them have their pluses and minuses, but it is hard to argue with the seamless Spry integration that is in the new CS3 version. It makes implementing common AJAX implementations pretty much a drag-and-drop affair. We combined the use of Spry with some of our ColdFusion applications and the results are great.
• XSLT and XML Parsing
  It’s now much simpler to parse XML within the Dreamweaver environment, as you can browse the XML tree of any document, online or offline. This makes it much easier to syndicate content into your pages. One of the problems with using live XML, such as RSS feeds with this method is that you should plan to download the XML and parse it at at timed intervals if you expect your application to scale. For example, some sites limit the number of times a single IP address can reload a feed file. Slashdot and other sites do this. So if you had say 30 people or more hitting a news page that consumes a live feed, your server’s IP could be blocked. So you need to make an application page that consumes the feed, writes the files, then DW CS3 can aid you in parsing it, etc.
• CSS
  One of the features I was hoping to see, but it didn’t arrive, is the addition of site-wide design-time style sheets. I hate having to attach style sheets to each page as a “design-time” style sheet to see the styles in my pages. This probably isn’t an issue for developers that don’t use an application framework like Fusebox, but we do so it is an issue. It’s a minor thing, but it is annoying. Other than that, I really like that you can preview CSS for multiple devices, like handheld devices. There is also a new compatibility checker that lets you know if there will be a problem in rendering your CSS in different browsers. Dreamweaver CS3 also adds outlines and shadows to DIV layouts, which is helpful when you are designing complicated nested layouts with DIVs.