I heart Dreamweaver
Written: Aug 21 '00 (Updated Aug 22 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: makes designing a pleasant, time-efficient experience
Cons: some little quirks
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| bethy's Full Review: Adobe Dreamweaver 2 Full Version Academic, Not For... |
When I first started at my web design position, I had never used any HTML editors, let alone Dreamweaver. In fact, Dreamweaver kind of intimidated me. I'd heard others rave about it, so I figured it must be cool, but I'd open it now and then and look at all the weird little floating menus and think, "Nah, this is too hard, I'll just use FrontPage." I just wasn't skilled enough for Dreamweaver, I thought. Then, one slow day at work, I decided to conquer my fear and just play with the durned program. And so began our love affair.
If you're new to web design, Dreamweaver might indeed be too hard to master at first. But, as with anything, practice will prove fruitful. And for someone who is a relative coding pro and knows, HTML-wise, how to make their page look exactly like their mock-up in Photoshop did, Dreamweaver saves enormous amounts of time. On top of that, it writes very clean, generally correct code, and it doesn't mess up the code you write (like many other HTML editors, including FrontPage).
I'll talk about my peeves first; then I'll move onto why we should all send presents to the people who created this wonderful program.
The uncool parts
1. For some reason, when you want to specify a background for a table cell, it puts the background specification in the <tr> (row) tag, rather than the <td> (column) tag. Internet Explorer (which likely also means Netscape 6) only reads cell background specifications when they're in the <td> tag, so I always have to dip into the source code to change this or do it by hand in the first place.
2. If you accidentally click on a very skinny transparent gif, it will often resize the skinny part to 8 pixels wide. It's happened to me so many times that the 8 pixels thing can't be a coincidence. This isn't a big deal, but it is annoying.
3. If you specify a font and then click where you plan to type rather than automatically start typing, the font choice goes back to default. Also, fonts sometimes revert to default between paragraphs as well.
4. If your screen is small, you'll want to have as few of the menus (called floating palettes) open as possible. Dreamweaver is somewhat similar to Adobe products in that it has lots of menus available for optional use, including ones for Properties of objects (such as table properties), commonly used objects (for instance, you can insert a line break by hitting a button on this menu), and behaviors (for various JavaScript actions), and other menus. Even on my gigantic screen at work, the Properties menu still becomes an annoying necessity getting in the way of my art projects. Yet the presence of these floating menus eliminates the need for Windows-like icons at the top of the interface, which allows for maximization of screen space to design with.
All of the irritating aspects of Dreamweaver I listed are very minor. I may have a larger list if I used Dreamweaver to do more complex activities. So far, I've used it to lay out fairly complex pages with numerous embedded tables, insert rollover images, insert text, and edit text. For all of these activities, Dreamweaver is undeniably proficient and helpful. Users can, however, download a range of behaviors from Dreamweaver's web site that allow them to insert more complex features to their pages. For instance, I recently downloaded a template that would let me create a trendy letterbox look to pages with ease. I'll never use it, but it's there for the free taking.
Other cool parts
1. Dreamweaver makes inserting links as simple as it should be. You highlight text and then type in the URL in the Properties box. It's so much more user friendly than FrontPage in this respect. It's also faster to insert images in Dreamweaver than in FrontPage, because there's no option for clip art, and because "Images" is the first item under "Insert" (in FrontPage, it's near the bottom).
2. It's good for manipulating tables. If you can dream it, and HTML can jive with it, then Dreamweaver can make your crazy table arrangements happen.
3. It always provides the screen dimensions you're using at the bottom of the interface. So if you want to design for the 640 x 480 crowd, you can instantly see how much of your masterpiece will be cut off by resizing the window, once you remember you were supposed to be designing in those dimensions.
4. It writes your JavaScript! You can do wacky things like have a click on one frame open two frames at once as well as make standard rollovers (and much other stuff) with only minimal understanding of how JavaScript works and absolutely no code writing. In particular, Dreamweaver's rollover function saves enormous amounts of time.
5. When you want to edit the source code, it opens another window on top of your design. You can move it to see the instant effects of your changes. This could be viewed as a con rather than a pro - FrontPage's and Allaire Homesite's tabs for switching among code/design/preview views are pretty handy. But I feel like I'm getting to see both at once with Dreamweaver.
What else? Dreamweaver lets you create templates for pages, insert multimedia files (like Flash movies), preview easily in Netscape and IE, create a selection of CSS styles to choose from as you format sections of your page, make forms, create frames, and code in layers if preferred. It also has a sizeable History feature that allows for (I think) 25 undos.
So really, if you're interested in web design or already are designing and aren't using this product, the reasons you aren't should either be:
1) You're afraid of it
or
2) It costs too much.
First, don't be afraid. I think its Mac-ness was what got to me, but once I got over that, I realized that it's only trying to help. And it's very good at helping.
Cost-wise, it's about $300, but if you're someone who's serious about designing for the web, it's a worthwhile investment. So if you are, try to find a deal (buy.com? edu.com, students?) and purchase this wonderful product.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
bethy
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Member: Beth
Location: NY
Reviews written: 60
Trusted by: 36 members
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