How useful is Dreamweaver for web design?

[Melvil]

Hi all,

As part of a general interest in trying my hand at doing web stuff, I'm thinking about doing a Dreamweaver course (I'm thinking it would be quite handy as I'm fairly au fait with Photoshop / Illustrator / Indesign and it's an adobe product too).

My question is: is this a good route to learning a bit about web design and maybe making my own site?

Any thoughts much appreciated!

Mel.

 

[Howard]

My question is: is this a good route to learning a bit about web design and maybe making my own site?

Ultimately it won't teach you anything about web design - in the same way a spanner won't teach you about engineering. It will enable you to publish stuff on the web though, which might just be what you are looking for.

It's not cheap, though.

 

[Melvil]

Very true, it's only a tool (like me :-))

Ultimately it won't teach you anything about web design - in the same way a spanner won't teach you about engineering. It will enable you to publish stuff on the web though, which might just be what you are looking for.

It's not cheap, though.

 

[Melvil]

If you're au fait with the other Adobe stuff then it's fairly certain you'll find it easy to use Dreamweaver and it's pretty easy to set up your own sites.

I use it a lot for a corporate intranet and I like it.

Hopefully others can recommend books on web design as I was pretty much self taught and made lots of basic errors at the start which I should have easily avoided with hindsight!

That's good to know - interesting to know you use it for corporate intranet, too. Aye, sometimes Adobe products aren't linked together as much as I'd like and have totally different keyboard shortcuts for the same things, which is annoying.

 

[Dilbert]

I use HTML Kit which is free

Sitepoint is quite good and they do some good books, especially for Cascading Style Sheets

 

[CopperBrompton]

Dreamweaver is excellent. I have a rather old copy that still does the job well. All my websites, personal and professional, were created in it (with a bit of hand-coding here & there, but those bits were more likely due to me not knowing how to do them in Dreamweaver than any gaps in the package).

 

[Melvil]

Just had a look at your site, Ben, excellent, love the slideshow; that's the kind of format I want to pursue - glad to know it can be done in Dreamweaver.

Dreamweaver is excellent. I have a rather old copy that still does the job well. All my websites, personal and professional, were created in it (with a bit of hand-coding here & there, but those bits were more likely due to me not knowing how to do them in Dreamweaver than any gaps in the package).

 

[Melvil]

Cheers Dilbert - not sure I can make sense of the link, though?

I use HTML Kit which is free

Sitepoint is quite good and they do some good books, especially for Cascading Style Sheets

 

[Howard]

Dreamweaver is excellent.

On a side note I thought that Dreamweaver + Contribute was one of the best ways of creating and managing enterprise web content out there. The Contribute interface did such a great job of focusing authors on what actually mattered - words and meta data - rather than spending their time fighting with the tool (like most CMS products five years ago). Does it still exist?

 

[CopperBrompton]

Just had a look at your site, Ben, excellent, love the slideshow; that's the kind of format I want to pursue - glad to know it can be done in Dreamweaver.

Thanks. The slideshow is currently done in Flash, but I'm just tweaking the HTML5 replacement at the moment and that should be online within the next couple of weeks. (The reason being those damn iPhones and iPads being unable to support Flash.)

 

[marzjennings]

I wouldn't bother with dreamweaver. It's not so much the software (which is pretty good) just the all the work in building a site and uploading it to a basic hosting service and then fixing all the links that don't work (relative path, addressing, etc). Much easier to use fully support hosting site with online tools. Pick a template, upload and maintain content, done. The wife uses squarespace (squarespace) for her site and has done for years (chookooloonks). Our neighbour maintains our neighbourhood site, creating templates adding links and pages, building it all through dreamweaver and when she asked for some tips from my wife (thinking she must be doing the same) she was stunned how easy it is for my wife to maintain her site.

 

[HJ]

Dreamweaver is basically for graphic designers who to lazy to bother leaning to code, it is fine until something goes wrong or you need to something interesting, in which case you are shafted. You'd be better off downloading a copy of HTML Kit and learning to code HTML and CSS, it is actually fairly straight forward...



edit: added link

 

[CopperBrompton]

Dreamweaver is basically for graphic designers who to lazy to bother leaning to code, it is fine until something goes wrong or you need to something interesting, in which case you are shafted.

Only if you view using Dreamweaver and being able to write HTML as somehow being mutually exclusive.

I created my first website long before the days of HTML editors, so every line was hand-coded. These days I'd consider it a silly use of my time to continue hand-coding new pages and editing the HTML directly to make changes, so I use Dreamweaver. I still occasionally need to dip into the code, but that's something Dreamweaver makes very easy with its choice of WYSIWYG, HTML and combined views.

 

[HJ]

I started coding HTML in MicroEMACS, being able to code properly is a very useful discipline and not something you will learn from using Dreamweaver. The advantage you gain from using an HTML editor such as HTML Kit is that there are tools there to speed up your coding and check that it is valid but doesn't do it for you. WYSIWYG editor tend to produce really ugly code which isn't valid, OK so modern browsers will render it just fine, but google bot hates it, so it depends on where you priorities lie...

 

[CopperBrompton]

WYSIWYG editor tend to produce really ugly code which isn't valid

Definitely not true of Dreamweaver. It's fully standards-compliant.