desgn view looks good, extreme distorton in live view

Question

I have DW 21.3 on a refurbished 2018 Macbook pro. I am a stained glass artist who made a fairly cool website ( www.brooksideglasworks.com) starting with golive and then dreamweaver which i first put up in 2002 or so. But my older version of DW stopped working on newer OS and I have not worked on my site for years.
I was never going to be a webmaster and barely get code, which is why the whole wysiwyg thing seemed to be a way to do it. Anyway I started a subscription to DW as a part time teacher, and downloaded my site.
I was a little disappointed that the images do not load and i had to manually move them into place but I made the changes I wanted to the index page, doing a lot of looking at the good code to fix the bad and and it looked great in the Live view when I finished. My index and page one of an overview of my work are the most complex , but I had that 2nd page looking good even thought there was still some red code I want to fix. But when I looked at the site in the live view ( or browser) it is completely distorted and off the edge and overlaps and things moved. Apparently what you see is no guarantee of what you get. How the location info from absolute positioning fails is hard to understand. Kind of semi-absolute

SO HERE ARE MY QUESTIONS:( sorry for the long introduction but it might help )
1) Is there some way to force a redoing of the code based on the visual layout on the design view screen? This code actually works online so it seems like it should be salvageable. Too much to ask for, right? ( Should I send photos of before and after from design to live,
2) the 2nd page is done in these numbered apDiv boxes to hold text or images or both and each has an absolute position( i use this because I'm not a grid person (and I pay for it). There is no red lines in this area but quite a few in the code text below that. I really can't understand the feedbackmessages I get when I move cursor over the reded lines of code. I just wonder if I startd a new version of the page and just put this apDiv code in first and then added text and images in the pre-sized and pre located boxes if that would generate better code and I could watch it as I go and so keep it clean.
I would watch tutorials, and I may have to, but they tend to go too fast and I don't know the terms that well. If you know some infotutorials for genuine novices or can point me in the right direction on this issue I'd be grateful.

<#apDiv10 {
position: absolute;
width: 416px;
height: 223px;
z-index: 7;
left: 85px;
top: 200px;
}
#apDiv11 {
position:absolute;
width:302px;
height:355px;
z-index:8;
left: 281px;
top: 846px;>
Below is some of the problem stuff

S

Ben M · Accepted Answer

Yes, I talked with one other community (PineGrow) a week ago, considering their product and I posed questions about absolute positioning and I could see a big split on the issue, several saying move away from it, others use it. Ben has sent code that avoids completely absolute positioning and I think I will start there and see were I can take it. Your thoughts on cost have merit and I am kind of surprised how weak the support for DW is here on this adobe sponsored site but hey, you guys obviously know a thing or 2. I was kind of feeling about DW that there is too much promotion and expense and not enough fulfillment of promise. I suppose people are used to it and getting it up to date now is a major deal with many downsides. Naturally I thought their product would be the most seemless to make needed adjustments to a site that was made with it. I have a fairly inexpensive host, like 34 bucks a year, so am planning to stay there.

Unfortunately it has been this way in a few Adobe communities. As you could probably imagine in its prime, this forum was very active and admittedly I, like many others, used DW moreso than I do today. As far as editors go, I have Nova (formerly Coda) on my Mac for when I need to do quick edits. But that has to do more with my workflows which are more closely related to other Adobe products like Marketo. But to the point of communities that have gone quieter lately, XD is another that has been quieter in minimal maintenance since Adobe's proposed merger with Figma which is no longer happening.

With those solutions I mention you would have to leave that host as these solutions include hosting on their platform. This way they can help control the code if there are updates affecting everyone. Using Wix as an example their entry plans which should be more than enough for you range from $16-27/mo which is the editor + hosting, or Squarespace is $16-23/mo for the similar service.

At the end of the day, unlike Photoshop or Illustrator with more proprietary file formats, HTML can be edited in a simple text editor and unlike Microsoft's Frontpage that had a shorter life, the use of proprietary code from editors on the web has since gone away as at its core it is simply just plain text code. Some of the more visual users went to hosted solutions, and others went into more of the dev world with git and other testing lifecycles as the web branched out into apps and more than just a simple website.

Ben M · Answer

Personally speaking after viewing your site and hearing what you are looking to do visually, I don't think DW is the best solution for you. Given the cost of DW, the status of it, and your desire for a visual editor, I would probably recommend migrating the site to a template with a hosted solution like a Wix/Squarespace/Webflow.

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