I work for a company that runs Dreamweaver training courses and we find that there is no longer a typical user of this great web development program. Dreamweaver users now seem to come from all different types of company and from all walks of life: private individuals, financial people, marketing people, people in the health service, academicians It seems everyone needs to learn the basics of web development nowadays.
One thing is for certain, on our courses, we are now getting far more people learning Dreamweaver who are not and do not intend to become specialists in web development. They are, more typically, people who need to develop web content and who perceive Dreamweaver as the best program to use for the task in hand. Coming to this conclusion is almost inevitable since Dreamweaver is widely perceived as the software tool of choice for both the casual and professional web developer.
Dreamweaver has obtained its position as undisputed number due to the fact that first Macromedia and now Adobe have paid careful attention to the needs of web developers of all types and to the technologies used to build web sites. They have managed to create a product which satisfies the needs of both amateur and professional web developers and which embraces emerging standards in the web sites are constructed. As web developers and web development has evolved, Dreamweaver has evolved with it. That’s why Dreamweaver is still around while all of its original competitors have disappeared.
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.
With each release of Dreamweaver, Macromedia continued to add features which showed that they understood the need to create clean code even when using visual tools. They added features to the program for maintaining the integrity of code and removing redundant elements. They enhanced their coding environment with features like line numbering, code hints and the tag selector, a feature which displays the tag underlying the currently selected element and the hierarchy of tags in which the element is contained. They also added the ability to verify whether a web page contained code incompatible with certain browsers.
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.
Recognising that the web is not a static environment but is still constantly evolving, Macromedia (and now Adobe) have kept an eye on emerging web technologies and incorporated content relating to those technologies. Dreamweaver behaviors can be used to create useful JavaScript functions for such things as form validation. XML code can be edited and validated. Another illustration of the way in which Dreamweaver embraces emerging standards can be seen in the way in which Dreamweaver CS3 now encourages developers to use CSS to layout their pages rather than using tables, making their pages compliant with current standards.
The latest Dreamweaver also includes some groovy new features which embrace the Ajax technology using the Adobe’s Spry Framework for Ajax, a library of automatically generated JavaScript code which allows the creation of interactive web page on which page content can be updated in response to user actions without the page having to be reloaded.
Each new release of Dreamweaver brings exciting as well as practical new features which always seem to slot nicely into the familiar easy-to-use interface. This coupled with the fact that Dreamweaver always allows experienced professionals full access and control over every aspect of the web pages and web applications they are developing should ensure that the program continues to be the automatic choice for any individual or organisation needing a decent software tool for web development of any kind.
If you would like to learn more about Dreamweaver training courses, visit Macresource Computer Training, an independent computer training company offering Dreamweaver training courses in London and throughout the UK.
