One of my cousins called me the other day looking for advice on how to maintain a website that is being designed for him. The designer is using Dreamweaver to make it, and once it's finished my cousin plans on taking over and will be updating it daily. He's fairly handy with computers, but like me he's not so familiar with website related things. He's wondering if he'll have to get Dreamweaver in order to update it since that's how it was created and if so, how easy it would be to teach himself how to use it. I told him I really wasn't sure, so I thought I'd throw the question out to the board and get some advice to point him in the right direction.

Thanks!
Angela

You dont have to use dreamweaver to maintain a website. Although It is a good program. You can use other web editing programs, or even code by hand. But since it seems like this person does not know all that much, that a web editor is good.

I dont have enough information to make a good recommendation of what to do, but if they can get Dreamweaver, that would be a lot of help for them. If the updates they were going to be doing were really simple, then editing the code by hand wouldnt be that hard either.

As Buggy said you don't really need a web editing program like Dreamweaver or Frontpage to do the work. You can code without them. Of course this all depends on your experience with coding. For those people who aren't experts at HTML or whatever a web editing tool might be good.

Now as far as picking the tool to use I can only discuss the major two that I have used, Dreamweaver and Frontpage. Both are fairly easy to use. Most of my experience is with Frontpage although more recently I have started to try and use Dreamweaver. And when first looking at Dreamweaver you can realize that it is a very powerful program and you can do many different things with it. Normally I would say to use frontpage because it is fairly easy to work with and is easy to get used to. But with someone who might not have good coding skills Dreamweaver might be the best to go with.

Both of them offer the option of doing either code or a "Normal" view. In the normal view you just tell the program what you wish to do (in a manner of speaking) and it creates the code for you behind the scenes. So you really don't have to worry about the coding. Dreamweaver seems to have an advantage over Frontpage in this respect, it gives the user many more options.

My pick, Dreamweaver.

check out HTMLed32

its a free html editor and simplistic to use

It's worth learning Dreamweaver.

Look at what I turned out with it: http://www.jeff-fischer.net/website.html

What's in the Cool Stuff Box? I couldnt get in (I dont know the password).

Cool stuff.

Good jorb!

Thanks for the feedback guys. I wasn't sure whether a website was 'special' when created with Dreamweaver and required Dreamweaver to maintain it, and now I have my answer. Thanks again.