Why Dreamweaver Has All Bases Covered

Our company runs training courses on Adobe Dreamweaver, the industry-standard web development software. And we are increasingly finding that the profile of the person wanting to learn Dreamweaver is becoming distinctly, well, frankly, unpredictable! It seems that just about anyone nowadays can find themselves needing to build a website or to create web content in some shape or form.

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.

In the early days of the web, all web development was done using fairly raw tools, like Windows Notepad. In the mid to late nineties, when companies started releasing WYSIWYG editors which allowed users to work in a user-friendly, visual environment, serious web developers didn't rate these programs very highly. Even in those days, however, Dreamweaver was a cut above the rest. Macromedia wooed coders by bundling popular code editing software with Dreamweaver (HomeSite on Windows and BBEdit on Macintosh.)

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.

In June 2000, Macromedia added another string to their bow by releasing a special edition of Dreamweaver called Dreamweaver UltraDev. This version of Dreamweaver contained all the features of the basic programs but added special utilities for creating dynamic content. Users could create server-side content using ASP, ColdFusion or JavaServer pages. The program automatically generated code for connecting to a database, retrieving and displaying data and linking elements on a web page to a data source. Two years later, they dropped UltraDev and added all of its functionality into the standard version of Dreamweaver, further enhancing its appeal to serious web developers.

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.

The web is constantly evolving and new technologies are being developed to make web sites more appealing to visitors. The owners of Dreamweaver have always been very good at embracing these new technologies sooner rather than later. An illustration of this can be seen in the latest version of Dreamweaver which includes a series of CSS layouts which can be used by newbie web developers to create pages which separate web content from information relating to the styling of that content. Dreamweaver also has useful features for making it easy to make your content accessible to web surfers with disabilities.

Dreamweaver CS3, the latest version of the program, also incorporates some great new features for adding Ajax functionality to web pages. Ajax offers web developers a way of creating web applications that execute rapidly and are seamlessly incorporated into the standard content of the web page. Coding Ajax web applications requires a good knowledge of JavaScript programming. Using Dreamweaver's Spry Framework for Ajax, developers can create sophisticated Ajax applications without having to write the code themselves.

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 The writer of this article is a training consultant with Macresource Computer Solutions, a UK IT training company offering Adobe Dreamweaver Classes at their central London training centre.

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