Dreamweaver Makes Me Feel Ignorant
Written: Sep 30 '00 (Updated Nov 05 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Very sturdy; advanced HTML features
Cons: Extremely difficult to learn
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| deliciae's Full Review: Adobe Dreamweaver 2 Full Version Academic, Not For... |
By profession, I am a producer for a web shop in New York City. Our HTML coders use Dreamweaver, but producers generally do not. However, we recently implemented it in the production department so that producers could create extranet sites for client projects, and as a result, I have had to bite the bullet and delve into the world of Dreamweaver WYSIWYG coding.
Let me begin the review by giving a bit of background: in a previous incarnation, I was a software trainer, responsible for training and help desking over 15 programs for a company of 500. I generally know my way around software, and with a few hours practice, can figure out most of what I need to know about a program to begin using it.
With that confidence in mind, I sat down to teach myself Dreamweaver one day last week. Several hours later, I left my desk with a headful of new terminology and a ball of confusion stuck in there like none I had experienced before. Learning this program is difficult, at best.
Dreamweaver helps you start from scratch, and like most WYSIWYG programs, allows you to drag and drop elements onto your page instead of coding the HTML by hand. It creates the HTML code for you as you move elements around and choose attributes like color schemes. It allows you to insert other types of files, like Flash movies or Fireworks code. In fact, it contains just about every functionality that a webmaker could want. Herein lies the problem, I think: it almost contains too much functionality, meaning there is a lot to learn about this program.
The biggest problem I am encountering in using this program, besides the overly steep learning curve, is that the HTML source code needs more frequent correction than I am willing to accept. I have a moderate-to-high knowledge of how to code HTML by hand, and have needed to correct at least two or three tags on every page I've created in Dreamweaver thus far. I've noticed that it also tends to make the code a bit bloated, adding more code than is necessary at times. I have had problems with the FTP function as well, though that could be possibly attributed to my relative inexperience with the program.
Dreamweaver does have some obvious functionalities that make it superior to competitors such as FrontPage: it includes support for other technologies such as Fireworks and Flash, it allows for fast checking of HTML coding (though my experience shows that you should probably read the code yourself as well), and it allows you to build libraries of commonly used "objects", meaning that you can quickly insert lines of code that you use often. However, I believe that Dreamweavers' price (it retails for somewhere in the neighborhood of $375) and wide array of functionalites put it way beyond what most for-fun coders would ever need.
In my shop, the HTML jockeys use Dreamweaver as a base program, meaning that we use it as a primary program with which to code. I defer to their knowledge of WYSIWYG editors and believe them when they tell me it is superior to most other programs on the market for this purpose. However, as a novice user myself, I cannot recommend this to other people just beginning to use such programs. Definitely not to the impatient ones, anyway.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
deliciae
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Location: New York, NY
Reviews written: 24
Trusted by: 22 members
About Me:
same bat time, same bat channel...
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