Why Use a Tool?

You've just spent the last 14 lessons learning how to create Web pages by yourself, so why would you want to use a tool? The biggest reasons are time and ease of use. The Web is a very visual medium and staring at HTML code in a text editor is not very visually stimulating. It's easy to forget to be creative when you are concentrating so hard on making sure that you're using the correct HTML tags and putting them in the proper place in the document.

Web page authoring tools come with enough bells and whistles to get your Web site started in no time, and feature excellent site management and reporting tools. There are differences, though. FrontPage, for example, comes with a set of design themes that you can apply to your own pages to give your site a professional look. Dreamweaver has extensive support for style sheets. You can easily create style sheet declarations and apply them to the other pages in your Web site.

FrontPage and Dreamweaver are consistently voted best of the best and you might find that one of them could help you, too. In the following sections, I want to introduce you to some of the most interesting features of both products.