Dreamweaver:
Professional
Web Site Design Editor
SolveYourProblem.com Article Series: Web Site Design
Dreamweaver is sometimes seen as FrontPage's
main competitor but, really, there's not even a comparison
to be made. Dreamweaver might be expensive, sure, but there
are serious web designers out there using it and getting work
done I can guarantee you that no real designer has ever used
a copy of FrontPage to design a website. Consequently, Dreamweaver
is way out in the lead in terms of market share, with about
80% of the users.
So what do you sacrifice to get a better WYSIWYG editor? Well,
apart from the higher price tag, you also sacrifice a certain
amount of simplicity. Once you get used to it, though, Dreamweaver
isn't as hard to use as you might think.
From the People Who Brought You...
Dreamweaver is part of the Macromedia Studio that's the
company that produces the editor and player for Flash, as well
as the well-liked Fireworks graphics editor and the Freehand
drawing program. Their software is particularly popular with
designers, and all it works on the Mac, but it has recently
started to be quickly adopted by non-expert users as well.
Dreamweaver Doesn't Mess With Your Code
If you've already done some of the coding for your site, or
you're editing a template or a design that was done for you
by someone else, then you don't need to worry about Dreamweaver
re-writing all your code and breaking it. Dreamweaver will
leave your code alone for the most part, unless you explicitly
tell it to alter it. This might not sound like much, but it's
really refreshing to see after using other HTML editors.
For this reason, Dreamweaver is often considered to be the
very best software out there for working with HTML templates,
and most templates that you can buy will be provided to you
in Dreamweaver's format. Once you've got them, you can easily
open them and insert your content.
Standards
The code Dreamweaver used to produce was quite bad at conforming
to standards it worked fine on most browsers, but it didn't
validate. In the most recent versions of Dreamweaver, though,
not only does the code Dreamweaver produces validate, but it
even has a validator built in. You can pick which standards
you want Dreamweaver to code to, and it will stick to them
for you, even if you choose the strictest ones out there.
Dreamweaver was one of the first programs to support visual
XHTML editing, and has received a lot of credit for it all
you need to do to turn this option on is tick the box marked
'Make Document XHTML Compliant' when you create a new page.
This newfound standards-compliance removed the last thing keeping
a lot of designers away from Dreamweaver, which means that
the program's market share has grown still further over the
last year or so.
CSS, Javascript and PHP
A large part of Dreamweaver's power comes in how easy it is
to edit not only HTML, but also the things that go with it.
Dreamweaver comes with a formidable Javascript library that
does most of the useful things that can be done with Javascript,
and makes it very easy to apply CSS styles to different parts
of your page.
In the latest version of Dreamweaver, you can even make interfaces
to a MySQL database using PHP without doing any programming
at all. This is a very useful feature, and saves a lot of headaches
for many people who just want to make a simple database-driven
website without learning PHP.
Books About Dreamweaver
Dreamweaver is a complex and useful enough program that whole
books have been written about it and to get the most out
of the program, you should really get a good one and read it
through. Here are a few suggestions:
Macromedia
Dreamweaver MX 2004: Training from the Source -
Khristine Page. This is the official guide produced by Macromedia.
Beginning
Dreamweaver MX - Imar Spaanjaars. Follows the development
of three very different websites using Dreamweaver, a nice
format for a tutorial book.
Visual
QuickStart Guides: Macromedia Dreamweaver MX - J. Tarin
Towers. A nice reference that's especially good to refer back
to when you need to know how to do something specific.
#
# # # #
SolveYourProblem.com : 2007
> Home > Website Design Articles: Main Page
|
