Pros and Cons of Dreamweaver Template..

[Tina Eat Lard]

Hi,

Im new to actinic, im thinking of doing my main design in Dreamweaver and inserting the actinic code elements.. I just wanted to know if there are any disadvantages of doing this, instead of using a Theme from actinic? Will the Dreamweaver template approach using tables give me less search engine visibility than a complete css route??

Any advice would be appreciated.

Cheers

[Duncan Rounding]

You can of course use css layouts in DW not just tables. In theory you should be better off (at least long term) with css. That said a lot of sites do very well with table layouts.

DW gives you the flexibility to customize yout layouts beyond what's available with the standard themes.

[leehack]

If you are any good with Dreamweaver, then use an external layout, if you know very little about it and just started out, stick to a standard template. I would make this descision on my ability within Dreamweaver alone.

[Tina Eat Lard]

Im comfortable in Dreamweaver, worked in it for years but only really using tables etc, not complete sites built using css, i just dont want to put myself at a disadvantage against my competitors if their sites are css based..

[Duncan Rounding]

Stick with what you are comfortable with. Make the site with tables and then change the layout later to a css one later perhaps. The most inportant thing is to get it up and running.

[leehack]

A nice happy medium is using both tables and css, a typical 4 or 5 cell layout for a site can easily blend the two together, giving the power of control and design with the css, yet the familiarity, advantages and reliability of tables.

[leehack]

A tabled based site can perform as good as a CSS one. In fact i would go as far to say that tables are still used amongst most sites that make money at the moment. It will be a slow changeover to CSS based designs, in fact it may never fully make it, who knows, it's years away any problems anyway IMO.

[Duncan Rounding]

...It will be a slow changeover to CSS based designs, in fact it may never fully make it, who knows, it's years away any problems anyway IMO.

Completely agree, until cross browser issues are resolved tables are here to stay.