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Web Studio 5 software?

I want to get a new/modern web site building program so i can add videos and links without underlines, better fonts, etc. I have the original Macromedia Dreamweaver program from like 1997 or whenever but I don't use 99% of that programming stuff so this program here looks pretty good and has a free 30 day trial.

Web Studio 5.0

It works in WYSIWYG and HTML so if I ever can get my head around html I can turn on the text editor.

Just curious if anyone here has used this program to do their websites, if not, what do you use? I'm not interested in purely HTML/CSS/PHP and all that cos I don't know anything about it. As close as a web editor can be to a visual layout program like QuarkXpress, drag, drop and type is best for me and the way I'm used to doing things.
 
Don't. Dreamweaver is better. None of what you're doing in either application is really programming, and yes, you do actually need that stuff that you don't know about. The only reason you don't know about it is because you don't realize that's what people use in order to do the things that you want to do.
PHP? Not yet. Support is important though. HTML and CSS are exactly what you need to learn about, however, because that's how you make webpages look the way you want them to look. There are plenty of books that can bring you up to speed with no problem. (The trick is picking one that doesn't bore you to tears in the process.) Take a look at w3c.org - I think they might have some "so you want to be a web designer" BS. At the very least you can find some explanations of the technology.
HTML/the world wide web was never meant to be edited as "raw HTML." The guy who designed HTML never imagined people would bother to learn something so ornery. HTML works on the same principles that a word processor like Microsoft Word uses to track where text belongs on the page; there's nothing about it that inherently requires a human author to dig around and do stuff by hand. (You can blame competing browser vendors not adhering to technological standards for that.)
Dreamweaver is about the best that you can get so far as drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG interfaces. You do need to learn something about the underlying technology eventually in order to understand what's going on and do your best work, but with the built-in tutorials you can get the basic layout tools down in an afternoon.
My strikes against this Web Studio program are threefold. For one, I can't find a legitimate review of it online; they're all dummy advertisement sites. Two, I've never heard of it or the publisher. Three, the vendor's website basically tells you that they're going to dumb down the internet for you, so you can be pretty sure that's what you're going to get.
What kind of website are you trying to make? For your purposes, a pre-built PHP-generated site might be the best choice for you. Basically, the PHP side of things comes pre-assembled. You supply the textual content in data files, and then you also give the PHP scripts layout templates so that they know how to pretty up the data for users. That's how the forums here work; people's posts and such are stored in big plain-text databases, and when you ask the PHP program for, say, thread #122773 - this thread - it takes the forum thread template, fills in some blanks, then takes the list of posts, puts those into the little orange-and-green bordered boxes, tacks those together one after the other with posters' names next to them, and then sends it all off to the user. Many pre-made blogs work the same way. You can get a surprising amount of flexibility with no programming whatsoever - just a little typesetting markup and you're good to go.
~Joe
 
NO idea what you're talking about with PHP and scripts and all that. Not even a little bit! LOL I'm not looking for a six month learning curve as I'm not planning a career change to web design, I just want to get my sites more modernized. Dumbed down with the ability to customize each feature is just what I need.

My main site is: BattleHelm.com designed entirely in Dreamweavers "layout view". I just save templates so all my reviews and interview pages look alike, it's not a forum or anything of the sort.

My sites are about as basic as it gets I'm fine with them as they are now, I just want to be able to embed videos and have cleaner pages like links with no underlining, drop down menus in the reviews and interviews sections, better fonts than the three in Dreamweaver, etc. I am already using Dreamweaver's original incarnation as part of the MX Studio suite before they sold out to Adobe but it doesn't do these things and I'm not sure the new version is worth $700 +/- just to be able to embed videos.
 
I doubt you're going to get that stuff from this other software. You flat-out can't do drop-down menus in pure HTML; you need to do some actual programming using Javascript or at the very least some clever layout work in CSS. Removing underlines from your links isn't too hard - it's either done using CSS styles or might have now be an option in HTML link tags.
I think that you could get a used book on your outdated version of Dreamweaver and save yourself a fortune with what you've already got. Software will not get you around understanding the technology. The differences in this application might be refreshing as you rebuild your whole site with their tools, but ultimately it won't do anything that Dreamweaver doesn't already do better. The most likely difference will be that you'll be working with a tool that no one else uses and no one else can explain to you. Dreamweaver is kludgy and overcomplicated, but it's an industry standard, which means that you can find free help galore online.
Let me put it this way; you're growing N. bical, and rather than reading about Nep culture, you're asking what kind of Kritter-Keeper will maintain your humidity the best. Can you throw money at the problem? Yes. Will doing so change what you get in return? Yes. Is it going to make a difference in getting you to where you want to be? No.

Dumbed down with the ability to customize each feature is just what I need.

You realize this is a contradiction in terms right?
Dreamweaver already does everything that you've mentioned. Actually, many of the things you seem to have in mind are relatively straightforward in any web editor. You just need to know how it's done in HTML in general so that you know what kind of buzzwords to look for inside your editor.
You're selling yourself short, dude. You don't need six months to learn this stuff - not even six weeks. But I do think that what you're doing with BattleHelm might be well-suited to a prefab blog setup or something similar. It will save you the trouble of managing your page templates, and oftentimes turnkey blogging servers have built-in web-based editors so you never need anything more than your web browser and a password.
~Joe
 
You can always give the task of coding your PSD to HTML/CSS to others who can. I would prefer to get my site coded up in html/css because it makes the site load faster and free from errors when it comes to other browsers. HTML is a fast mark up language and it is mostly preferred by a lot of people so I suggest you better use that too. Good luck mate!
 
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