Dreamweaver: Good or Bad?
Ask some web designers about Dreamweaver and most will tell you that anyone using it is a web design noob that wouldn’t last a minute without their precious little WYSIWYG editor.
Well I’m here to say they’re dead wrong.
Sure, there’s tons of people out there that got ahold of the program and created a million table-based designs that look like crap, but there are those (myself included) that use or have used Dreamweaver as a way to learn.
A year or two ago, a friend of mine gave me his copy of Dreamweaver MX 2004 because he already knew how to code everything by hand and at that point, I couldn’t code to save my life.
Because of my inabilities, being able to create a website by just clicking here and there was a Godsend. And being told by my highschool’s computer teacher that “Most web designers these days use Dreamweaver” was even more reason (or so I thought) to use it.
So in one night I created six or seven table-based templates to put on OSWD using nothing but Dreamweaver’s design view (absolutely no code is involved with design view. Just clicking and typing your content). I sent them off to OSWD, but they got rejected because they didn’t validate (something I had never even heard of).
So after a while I came to realize that I really needed to learn how to hand code. So I downloaded all of Andreas Viklund’s templates from OSWD and played with the code through Dreamweaver. In a couple of weeks I had taught myself XHTML and a CSS.
Now you may be saying, “Well you could’ve just done that with notepad and Firefox…”, and that’s true, but Dreamweaver made it very easy to learn. Being able to change a line of code at the top of the window and being able to see it instantly at the bottom is so helpful.
Of course, that’s not the only reason why Dreamweaver is a great learning tool. Dreamweaver assigns colors to different types of code.
For example, while looking at the code of a page, the (X)HTML is blue, the text is black, CSS is pink/dark blue, and PHP is red/green/blue. Dreamweaver also keeps your code organized. This can be extremely helpful when you’re first learning. Nothing is more confusing than a giant paragraph of code.
Quite possibly the most helpful thing about Dreamweaver is also the one thing that makes it so looked down upon… Design View.
Working in design view goes like this: You want to create a table, so you click the table button. You type in how many rows, columns, border width, etc. and hit enter. POOF! You’ve just created a table without typing any code, because the code is written for you.
So say you want to learn how to make a table instead of having one made for you. You create it like mentioned above, then look at the code and play with it until you’ve figured out what the different bits of code do.
So in conclusion, Dreamweaver can be an excellent tool for learning how to design web pages. To this day I still use it when I can’t figure out how someone did something in their template, or on their website.
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February 21st, 2007 at 9:26 am
Dreamweaver is a good learning tool, but the problem is that some people don’t move on to independent coding. And “developers” who use Dreamweaver to produce their websites start to dilute the web with these poorly made sites. This poor production value is what many developers look down on when it comes to Dreamweaver.
It may help people learn how things work with the web, but it also pulls away from the profession that is web development. Because anyone can use Dreamweaver to make a site, many people don’t see the point of paying for professional development.
May 4th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
DW is as good as any other text editor on the market. Of course you can take advantage of the design-mode and create some horrible sites, but who say you would?
What I look for in a text editor to create/edit HTML and CSS is:
1. Different colors for different types of code and colors that makes you beware of your mistakes.
2. Easy FTP uploading, or working directly on a remote server.
3. Overall stability and speed.
Dreamweaver CS3 works well together with other Adobe software which can also come in handy quite often.
Sure there are free alternatives, but that doesn’t make DW a sucky program.
March 7th, 2008 at 7:24 am
Dreamweaver isn’t a sucky program, but it is an overpriced one at $400. If you are in OSX Coda looks like a nice alternative with built-in FTP for under $100. Maybe DW is a good learning tool, but that price tag is ridiculous. As for stability and speed, Smultron and Cyberduck are very stable, free and allow you to work ‘directly’ on files.
My other problem with DW is that every employer that doesn’t know anything about the web thinks that DW is the industry standard. That’s unfortunate considering that the web is not a proprietary system and HTML + CSS is as free as any spoken language.
May 11th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
I recently picked up a book on dreamweaver and start learning it. Up until chapter 5 so far, it has been pretty confusing + disaspointing (except for the spry tools). I hope to get something more useful from dreamweaver down the chapters.
August 18th, 2009 at 7:41 am
Dreamweaver is a really great tool, the key to it is paying attention to your code as the same time that you’re designing in designer mode. If a person ignores the code, and doesn’t try to figure out how things work while they’re in designer/code view, then they’ll end up building crappy code. Dreamweaver gives you the ability to have massive global control over the entirety of larger sites, and I wouldn’t really want to try by staring at black code all day. The lazy person will suck at coding when using dreamweaver, but the savvy person will pay attention to exact detail in both design & code views. There’s pro’s and cons, and not everyone will be good at one or the other, but utilizing the best of both worlds I believe gives more power than the use of one or the other.
September 6th, 2009 at 5:23 am
DW for php is very very, bad. with aptana, zend studio, eclipse, netbeans, you can do anything in php,
September 7th, 2009 at 7:01 am
I don’t know that it’s “very very bad” for PHP. If you’re doing small amounts of PHP or fairly simple PHP, it’s just fine. However, it’s not nearly as good as Zend Studio or my personal favorite, Komodo by Activestate.
November 19th, 2009 at 8:44 am
are there any bad things about dreamweaver?