About Adobe Dreamweaver
Adobe Dreamweaver is a web development tool originally created by Macromedia to assist developers with making websites quickly in a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) interface. It is available for Mac and Windows, and has support for CSS, ASP, PHP, JavaScript, and more. In addition to the WYSIWYG interface, it also has a text editor so more experienced developers can get into the actual code and make alterations to it. The latest version is Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 v10.0.
The Advantages of Using Adobe Dreamweaver
Dreamweaver makes web design especially easy for new developers as you don't even have to know HTML to make a respectable web page. You can simply point and click your way to having a static website, and there are plug-ins available which allow you to add dynamic content to the pages as well. For someone who is intimidated by programming on even the most basic level, this tool gives them the ability to express themselves on the internet in a way they normally wouldn't be able to.
For more advanced users, it can speed up the process of web design by filling in the blanks while the designer stays in their creative mode. Later, if they want to make any changes, they can alter the code by hand through Dreamweaver's text interface.
Once a website is completed locally, the user can then upload the page via FTP directly to the server.
One advantage applicable to new and experienced users alike are the organizational capabilities of Dreamweaver. Websites can be messy and have files strewn all across the server or multiple servers, but Dreamweaver keeps it organized locally so that when you upload it, it retains the same structure as when you designed it on your machine.
For those already familiar with Adobe products, the recent incarnation of Dreamweaver has been made to look, feel, and operate like the others (photoshop, illustrator, and so forth).
Criticisms of Dreamweaver
Most of the disadvantages of Dreamweaver are created by inexperience by the user. While it can create a great website through the point and click interface, the code isn't going to be as clean as a custom-designed page made by hand. By the nature of making the tool accessible to everyone, it's unavoidable that there will be vestigial features and parts of the design that aren't at their best. This can lead to bloated code that runs slower, and it can also lead to a few errors in certain cases.
One of the common complaints is that the code created by Dreamweaver isn't necessarily W3C compliant, and it may display differently in certain browsers. However, Adobe has been listening to these complaints, and they have stated that they're working on refining the output so that it's compliant.
In the hands of an experienced user, they can quickly draft the page in the visual editor and clean up the code after. For the inexperienced, it really shouldn't be an issue because they couldn't have created the website in the first place if they didn't have Dreamweaver, and they probably won't know the difference either way.
Conclusions
At approximately $400 USD, Dreamweaver carries a steep price, but if you consider that a professional web developer and designer can cost thousands of dollars, it doesn't look so bad. The alternative is that you can learn how to do it by hand, but that could take anywhere from months to years.
Even with the price in mind, it's a great piece of software that's worth it. Even professional web designers use Dreamweaver because you can quickly adjust elements on the screen to make the perfect fit, and it can save you an enormous amount of time tweaking code.
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