When we run Dreamweaver training courses, we are always amazed at the number of different types of Dreamweaver user who attend our courses. There is simply no longer a typical Dreamweaver user. We get people working from all types of organisation in all types of role. Private individuals, accounts specialists, marketing specialists, academics, workers in the health services...
Our conclusion is that the vast majority of people learning Dreamweaver nowadays are not specialists in web development or web design. They are simply people who need to develop web content in some shape or form and who have chosen or been recommended Dreamweaver as the best tool for the job. Dreamweaver is perceived as the obvious choice for both casual and professional web developers.
Dreamweaver has become the industry standard web development software, seeing off rivals like Microsoft FrontPage. And it deserves its position. It is a great software package with powerful features and an approachable interface which lets anybody who can use a computer embark on a basic software development project and, with a bit of patience and knowledge of a few fundamentals, bring it to a conclusion. Dreamweaver has attained this dominant position because its creators have always aimed to satisfy the needs of all the different types of users of their software.
Back in the nineties when web editors (such as PageMill, Hot Metal Pro, FrontPage and Dreamweaver) started to appear, they were greeted with some scepticism by serious web developers (coders) who felt that they produced sloppy code and were really only of interest to people who didn't understand code and, basically didn't know what they were doing. Even back then, Macromedia, who owned Dreamweaver, bundled HomeSite (a Windows HTML code editor) or BBEdit (with the Macintosh version) to keep serious web developers happy.
About ten years ago (recognising the need to satisfy both types of user), Macromedia, the owners of Dreamweaver started making efforts to attract serious web developers to Dreamweaver. They addressed the code issue by including tools which would clean up inefficiencies in automatically-generated code and purchasing and bundling a coding utility called with Dreamweaver. They also enhanced their code environment with sophisticated features like line-numbering, colour-coding and code-hints and added other code-friendly features to supplement the visual development environment such as the tag selector which displays the HTML tags representing the objects on the page.
Another important feature that has helped to mark out Dreamweaver as a serious web development tool is its inclusion of tools for generating dynamic server side content using industry standard scripting languages such as ASP and ColdFusion and, later, ASP.Net and PHP. This functionality was originally introduced in mid 2000 in a slightly more expensive edition of Dreamweaver called Dreamweaver UltraDev. The idea back then was that heavyweight web developers would buy UltraDev and lightweights would buy the standard edition of Dreamweaver. However, in 2002, Macromedia simply stopped making UltraDev and put all of its functionality into the much cheaper standard edition of Dreamweaver, making Dreamweaver the obvious choice for web developers of all types.
Recognising that many web developers are members of a team, Macromedia also added features to Dreamweaver allowing teams of people to collaborate on the same site while avoiding the risk of two people making conflicting changes to the same page. Dreamweaver's collaborative features were called "File Check in/Check out". The program also introduced a feature known as "Design Notes". This allowed one developer to attach a note to a particular web page which could then be browsed by other members of his or her team.
As new technologies have emerged, the makers of Dreamweaver have also responded by taking them on board and modifying the way the program generates code. Thus, in the latest release of the program, Dreamweaver CS3, it is assumed that the user will be building websites using cascading style sheets (rather than HTML tables as was previously the case) and Dreamweaver offers a series of thirty or so different CSS page layouts that can be used to build efficient pages and adapted and personalised at will.
The newest release of Dreamweaver, CS3, also includes support for Ajax an exciting new way of creating interactive Web applications using XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. Dreamweaver's implementation of Ajax is via Adobe's Spry Framework for Ajax. Using the easy to use Spry interface, developers can create sophisticated Ajax interface elements, special effects and display data-driven content on their pages.
So, in short, Dreamweaver has all bases covered. Design-oriented web developers can use the program as a visual tool that generates reliable code. Experienced developers and programmers can work in code view and preview their work as required. Thus, the program makes web development approachable for just about any experienced computer user without dumbing down. This makes it deservedly the automatic choice for anyone who intends to become a web developer and needs a reliable software tool.
About the Author:
The author is a trainer and developer with Macresource Computer Solutions, a UK IT training company offering Adobe Dreamweaver Classes at their central London training centre.
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