I personally haven't found anything that Dreamweaver supports that FrontPage doesn't, including the Adobe/Macromedia application line. And if there is something you find, just put it directly into the html. And Frontpage is simpler all-around - design, layout, settings, everything. If Microsoft has done anything right with their Office suite, it's FrontPage.
Dreamweaver bugs me in 2 ways:
- First, every **** release they change EVERYTHING. Nothing is where it was before, everything looks fancier, and I get less window space that actually displays the page. One of the worst ideas in editing was putting all the properties and extra windows on the right hand side of the page. You NEED to see the entire width page when designing something, if you want it to look right for preview! With FrontPage, you can install it without the annoying right hand panels (which only show up for tables and select other properties), or if you don't customize your install, it's extremely easy to turn off.
- Second, you're constantly tricking the program into doing what you really want it to do (not to quote the mac editing guy or anything, but it's true). Wether your in the html view, the WYSIWYG view, or the split view (all of which FrontPage has and handles better), it's consistantly doing things automatically, only allowing this or that, and making you search the menus and eventually waste time finding the setting that is stopping you from doing what you want to do. This all starts with Dreamweaver only letting you put in one space when typing, which is absolutely ridiculous. We are past that stage in computer & internet technology, seriously, why doesn't it automatically put in the ??? Honestly, this is something I expected from the Word family, which allows typists to never learn how to spell nor punctuate as the paperclip auto-fixes everything (even things you don't want fixed)... but this time it's the other way around.
Well, dreamweaver will probably be no more (or at least hopefully). I've tried Adobe's GoLive and other web-related products, all of which I have been unimpressed with.
In any case, I suggest only making basic layout with a htmlediting program. Stay in split html view as much as you can; learn how things work, and do the majority of your editing in the html, not the layout.