Why Dreamweaver Has Become So Popular
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 organizations in all types of roles. Private individuals, accounts specialists, marketing specialists, academics, workers in the health services, etc. Of the people now wanting to learn Dreamweaver, the vast majority attending our courses will not necessarily become specialists in web development. Rather they have a need to develop content for a web site or to build a web site for a particular purpose. They have looked into the choices of software available and come to the conclusion that Dreamweaver is the best package to use and now they need to learn how it works.
Dreamweaver has become the industry standard in 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 anyone 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.
In the early days of web development, there were two types of web development tools: those used by coders (the specialists who understood the technologies underlying web pages) and the visual software tools which functioned in a manner similar to word processing and page layout programs which were used by non-specialists and inexperienced web developers. The visual programs (which included Dreamweaver) had a very poor reputation among web professionals who found that the code produced by these programs was clumsy, verbose, and inefficient.
About ten years ago (recognizing the need to satisfy both types of users), 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.
Macromedia also recognized that professional web developers often worked in teams and added collaboration features to Dreamweaver which allowed a group of people to work on the same web site without stepping on each other’s toes. They called the feature “File check in and check out”. They also created “design notes” facilities which allowed members of development teams to attach notes to individual web pages for the information of the other team members.
As new technologies emerged, the makers of Dreamweaver also responded by taking them on board and modifying the way the program generated code. Thus, in Dreamweaver CS3, it was assumed that the user would be building websites using cascading style sheets (rather than HTML tables as was previously the case) and Dreamweaver offered a series of thirty or so different CSS page layouts, that could be used to build efficient pages, adapted, and personalised at will.
Dreamweaver CS3, also incorporated 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.
As new features are added to Dreamweaver with each new release currently at Dreamweaver CS4, the program continues to have an interface which is user-friendly and approachable by any experienced computer user, bringing web development within reach of just about everyone on the planet. And it is this policy of satisfying the needs of professionals, as well as beginners, which will doubtlessly continue to make it the most obvious choice for anyone wanting to develop web content, at any level.
About the Author
The The writer of this article is a training consultant with Macresource Computer Solutions, an independent computer training company offering Adobe Dreamweaver training courses in London and throughout the UK.
