Dreamweaver is sometimes seen as FrontPage's main competitor
but, really, there's not even a comparison to be made.
Dreamweaver might be expensive, sure, but there are serious web
designers out there using it and getting work done - I can
guarantee you that no real designer has ever used a copy of
FrontPage to design a website. Consequently, Dreamweaver is way
out in the lead in terms of market share, with about 80% of the
users.
So what do you sacrifice to get a better WYSIWYG editor? Well,
apart from the higher price tag, you also sacrifice a certain
amount of simplicity. Once you get used to it, though,
Dreamweaver isn't as hard to use as you might think.
From the People Who Brought You...
Dreamweaver is part of the Macromedia Studio - that's the
company that produces the editor and player for Flash, as well
as the well-liked Fireworks graphics editor and the Freehand
drawing program. Their software is particularly popular with
designers, and all it works on the Mac, but it has recently
started to be quickly adopted by non-expert users as well.
Dreamweaver Doesn't Mess With Your Code
If you've already done some of the coding for your site, or
you're editing a template or a design that was done for you by
someone else, then you don't need to worry about Dreamweaver
re-writing all your code and breaking it. Dreamweaver will leave
your code alone for the most part, unless you explicitly tell it
to alter it. This might not sound like much, but it's really
refreshing to see after using other HTML editors.
For this reason, Dreamweaver is often considered to be the very
best software out there for working with HTML templates, and
most templates that you can buy will be provided to you in
Dreamweaver's format. Once you've got them, you can easily open
them and insert your content.
Standards
The code Dreamweaver used to produce was quite bad at conforming
to standards - it worked fine on most browsers, but it didn't
validate. In the most recent versions of Dreamweaver, though,
not only does the code Dreamweaver produces validate, but it
even has a validator built in. You can pick which standards you
want Dreamweaver to code to, and it will stick to them for you,
even if you choose the strictest ones out there.
Dreamweaver was one of the first programs to support visual
XHTML editing, and has received a lot of credit for it - all you
need to do to turn this option on is tick the box marked 'Make
Document XHTML Compliant' when you create a new page. This
newfound standards-compliance removed the last thing keeping a
lot of designers away from Dreamweaver, which means that the
program's market share has grown still further over the last
year or so.
CSS, Javascript and PHP
A large part of Dreamweaver's power comes in how easy it is to
edit not only HTML, but also the things that go with it.
Dreamweaver comes with a formidable Javascript library that does
most of the useful things that can be done with Javascript, and
makes it very easy to apply CSS styles to different parts of
your page.
In the latest version of Dreamweaver, you can even make
interfaces to a MySQL database using PHP without doing any
programming at all. This is a very useful feature, and saves a
lot of headaches for many people who just want to make a simple
database-driven website without learning PHP.
Books About Dreamweaver
Dreamweaver is a complex and useful enough program that whole
books have been written about it - and to get the most out of
the program, you should really get a good one and read it
through. Here are a few suggestions:
Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004: Training from the Source -
Khristine Page. This is the official guide produced by
Macromedia.
Beginning Dreamweaver MX - Imar Spaanjaars. Follows the
development of three very different websites using Dreamweaver,
a nice format for a tutorial book.
Visual QuickStart Guides: Macromedia Dreamweaver MX - J. Tarin
Towers. A nice reference that's especially good to refer back to
when you need to know how to do something specific.
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