I have been thinking about cleaning up the code we produce from Frontpage a great deal of late. Especially when we ran a keyword density tool on our home page and the most prominent keyword at the time was "color", which is obviously not used in the content but in the code (mainly in adsense).
Not sure if the SE's care about html words as much as the content words, but there must be something in having cleaner code.
Sure there are plenty of sites ranking well with poor code and structure, and many many site don't validate. But will it always be so? That doubt in itself was enough to make me think about planning for the future and start learning to code.
As for which is better Frontpage or Dreamweaver, well I've always used Frontpage because it's easy and I was lazy. But yesterday the thing refused to display any code or pages from a site with 15,000 pages in it. Yet when you previewed in a browser or imported into Dreamweaver all was fine - Strange but True.
Today I started coding (for the first time!!) by hand in dreameaver. Wow is this stuff easy, 1 hour in a book and I've rewritten our home page and the code is a clean as a whistle (I've not uploaded it yet). So a wizzywig boy has been converted overnight!!
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