Comments on: In Dreamweaver’s defense

By: Brad Strickland

Brad Strickland — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 23:17:33 +0000

I’m always amazed at the passion these discussions drum up. I guess it’s akin to rooting for your favorite football team. My team is better! No! My team is the best! But when you step back and put them all in the same white shirts and black shorts. There are the same number of players kicking around a ball. It’s what they do with the ball that matters. If you doubt me read the flaming comments surrounding any HTML5 vs Flash story.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that Dreamweaver, Coda, Textmate and all the rest are just tools. It’s the man or woman behind the keyboard that makes the difference and always has. Someone using GIMP can produce a superior design than someone using Photoshop. Provided that person is more talented and more familiar with the application they are using.

So In closing, use the applications that work best for you. I started out with Dreamweaver 1.0 and used it until I wasn’t getting the results I wanted, in the time I wanted them. Moved on to Textmate, Transmit and CSSEdit. Used that for a while, got tired of the problems with these three and then moved on to Coda. I’ve been using Coda since it came out and will continue to use it as long as it works for me. When it doesn’t I will figure out what does and move on.

By: Chris Raymond

Chris Raymond — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:03:47 +0000

Right on! So glad to read sound defense of a great tool that also integrates with Fireworks and can create clickable mockups/wireframes really easily. Due to what all my current coworkers use, I’ve become a Textmate/CSS Edit/Transmit person, but DW is a great tool–and has saved my bacon more than once by helping me to see where I failed to close a div, thanks to code highlighting via clicks in the tool bar at the bottom of the document. Textmate is useless for that.

By: PGabor

PGabor — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:05:13 +0000

I love Dreamweaver. The reasons I use it on a daily basis:

- Snippets. I have a bunch of own and when it comes down to repeating code (CSS global reset, conditional comments, meta section, comment forms, etc.), using of snippets could really speed up the process
- Built in validation tool
- Sitewide links checking tool
- Collapse / expand chunks of code
- Find and Replace

By: SKBrn

SKBrn — Fri, 21 May 2010 06:00:25 +0000

I used to like DW waaaay back in version 3.0; however, now I avoid it as much as possible. Why? Because as others have said, I’m a designer, not a coder…and Adobe has made DW way too code-centric.
Also, DWCS4 has sad site management tools, especially compared with the other visual web site design tool, GoLive. I love that I can diagram a complete site, send it off as a PDF to others for comments, and then create all the pages (with links) with just a click of a button.

It just seems odd to me that we are still hand coding so much; it’s like we are going back in time instead of progressing. Sort of like going back to the early days of wordprocessing when one had to insert tags or code to make a word italic, or to start a new paragraph, etc.

I hope what I’ve written makes sense, I’ve been up for 48 hours trying to decide on a design ‘look’ for my own site. Pathetic that I can’t make up my mind.

Scott

By: Eric

Eric — Thu, 20 May 2010 22:36:18 +0000

I learned (still learning actually) coding through Dreamweaver. Being able to see what it looks like on Firefox, helps me to look at it as code in Dreamweaver. While at the same time allows me to work/tweak the code right there and then.

To each there own I guess, but it works for me, and I’ve been able to design some decent web pages with Dreamweaver.

By the way I’m a graphic designer, not a web designer. But I do like to learn other aspects of the design field. Plus, it’s nice to get as a freelance gig. ;-)

By: Hussain

Hussain — Mon, 17 May 2010 11:49:57 +0000

Dreamweaver is a nice tool

By: Igor

Igor — Fri, 07 May 2010 23:58:22 +0000

Absolutely, DW is a greate tool for thouse who “Can” code. In addition to what have been said, I’d add that it allways upload changed file automatically in right folder on server. You dont have to worry where it goes. I wish it aded links to “included” .php files

By: Charlie Matar

Charlie Matar — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 22:39:15 +0000

Thank you so much for defense Dreamweaver!.

I’m using DW since 2000 and always have work for me.

-Love the way you wrote articles.-

By: RobUK

RobUK — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 18:04:45 +0000

It’s been a while since this article was posted, but just wanted to say that I’m in complete agreement, and love DW for all the same reasons as you!

By: George

George — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:23:45 +0000

@Jameos – What version of Homesite are you using? 5.5+? Do you have Administrator rights on your PC? Did you have to do anything special to get Homesite running? Thanks!