Last week I mentioned how Macromedia's graphics software Fireworks 3 was made especially for web developers. This week, I want to tell you why its partner application for WYSIWYG web site design, Dreamweaver 3, is quickly becoming a web developing standard.
I just learned Dreamweaver in exactly 13 days using the book Dreamweaver 3 Bible by Joseph Lowery. The combination of this thorough book and the excellent Dreamweaver software gave me one of the highest bang-for-the-buck reads in years. The chapters kept on going, showing me how to easily WYSIWYG even the most complex JavaScript and DHTML features, one after another. I never knew such complex code could be given such a simple interface!
With Dreamweaver 3, mouseover graphics are done in clicks. Image maps are click and drag. Cross-browser layering is magically simple. Timelines are created in Flash/Director-like fashion. The simple CSS interface brings reality to maintaining a complete web site with one cascading style sheet: click on a new color for a hyperlink and the color changes in every page on your web site. If you still use frames, Dreamweaver supports them thoroughly, making multiple window updates just clicks away. After the chapter on layers, I was able to use use Dreamweaver to give my personal website a 30-minute multimedia upgrade with rollover graphics and a flying message when users click on the button. Check it out! It would have taken hours to program that code for the mouse-up, animated layer trick. Dreamweaver, however, makes it as easy as clicking and dragging what you want -- like making a table in Word -- absolutely no coding required.
Dreamweaver’s FTP features surprised and delighted me in their simplicity and
extensiveness: finally it is possible to click on "update web site" and only
the changed files are uploaded to the server. Publishing to a sub-directory on your LAN is also supported.
And the check-in/check-out feature to enable teams to work together on a web
site will make many web development team leaders very happy. Nice!
A very useful and even slyly humorous feature is the ability of Dreamweaver to "clean up Microsoft Word HTML". Dreamweaver strips every last bit of bloated, proprietary code out of Microsoft Word’s HTML output, returning it to pure HTML. I experimented with this feature a bit and was able to convert even complex Word 2000 documents with colored tables and embedded pictures into clean, accurate HTML which looked impressively like their originals. If your web development job often requires you to "put Word files on the web", you will love Dreamweaver for this feature alone.
And get this: all of Dreamweaver’s menus, objects and behaviors are stored in text files, written in HTML, JavaScript and XML. This means that as you can restructure Dreamweaver the way you like it, adding new features and sharing them with others. Powerful! With this open philosophy, Macromedia is paving the way into a new kind of software for us. Even Flash 5 is going to adopt the standard interface which Fireworks 3 and Dreamweaver 3 already share. Imagine a web site generating script which creates personal versions of Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash for you (!). Imagine having your personal Macromedia software available to you at all times, no matter what computer you work on – just copy the files from your web site, or carry them around on a disk. Imagine being able to create a Dreamweaver "for the marketing department" and a Dreamweaver "for the graphic design department". New horizons!
Many times in the last two weeks while learning Dreamweaver, I simply had to get up, go for a walk, and consider the future consequences and ramifications of this technology: DHTML, CSS and JavaScript features are now available to me in cross-browser flavors with no coding necessary: quick and easy professional features. For me, learning Dreamweaver in August 2000 was as signicant as learning HTML in March 1997.
If you are an web developer expert, Dreamweaver will speed up your development as well as teach you lots of DHTML, CSS and JavaScript. If you are a beginner, Dreamweaver will allow you to create professional websites quickly allowing you to learn the coding at your own speed.
In any case, if you do web development, you need to know Dreamweaver. Find out for yourself. Download the 30-day Dreamweaver 3 Trial Version, get the Dreamweaver 3 Bible, and in 13 days you will have joined the growing number of web developers who know why Dreamweaver 3 is the up and coming web development standard for WYSIWYG design.
