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Summary: Review for Dreamweaver 5
Review: -This review is for Dreamweaver 5- I absolutely love this software. I had Adobe Go Live but I never seemed to take to it like I did with Dreamweaver. Once it was installed within a day, I had made several webpages. As I continued to use it I learned more and more intuitively without needing much guidance from the manual. As a user you can create your webpages visually or in code mode, this makes it a great option for anyone no matter what your skill - it can be adjusted to suit your needs. You can learn and develop your webpage skills as much or as little as you like. You do not need to be intimidated by it's high price. You can learn it and the cost is well worth the output. ...
I don't have to look for anything else, I have hit paydirt with this program! If you are using Front Page or any other visual interface for ease, you know that you are trapped into a forced format, get this program and you will understand the freedom of control without fear!
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Summary: As a web designer...
Review: ...no two pieces of software make my job easier than Dreamweaver and Fireworks. Managing multiple large sites is a breeze with these two, and allows me to all but give up hand coding (and focus more on design). Older versions required much more tweaking of the code in order to get some results, but with version 4.0, Macromedia has succeeded in making DW generate such good code, that I rarely have to fiddle with it. The features and ease of use are top of the line, and out do GoLive and other competing software in many areas. Fireworks is a must for easily creating great navigation and slicing up images in a fraction of the time it used to take. I still rely on Photoshop for many things, but most all other work is done in these two apps.IF YOU ARE A BEGINNER: I HIGHLY reccomend purchasing this package, as you will be creating semi-complex sites in no time. While it helps to know HTML/JavaScript, you don't need to know much about them with this software. IF YOU A PROFESSIONAL: Whether you are still hand coding (waiting for WYSIWYG editors to write better code), or using a competing product like GoLive, you must get your hands on these two. They are the best in the industry, and are must haves. Especially for designers/developers who work alone or in a small crew and are responsible for multiple sites and need to make updates quickly. Software rarely is made this well.
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Summary: The ultimate in web design software
Review: Being a web developer just got a whole lot easier thanks to Macromedia. Dreamweaver and Fireworks are both excellent programs in-and-of themselves, but together they make a lethal combination.
Packed with features for anyone ranging from the most inexperienced beginner to the mightiest webmaster, Studio 4 is very versatile. This package is fun to use because it takes the headache out of web design--all you have to do is actually design, and Studio takes care of all the technicalities. Fireworks is easy to use and, while not quite Photoshop, a very capable program. The graphics, animated gifs, and buttons you create are fully compatible with Dreamweaver, making it easy to use them on your site.
Dreamweaver is very user-friendly. All you have to do is organize the components of your site and Dreamweaver will build it for you. The result is a very attractive website.
This is the only web design software an amateur will ever need, and provides a good groundwork for professional designers too.
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Summary: Great combo
Review: Dreamweaver 4 is awesome as a WYSIWYG HTML editor, but it lets you get under the hood and fix code manually, too, if that's your bag. The HTML it generates is actually not that bad, either, if you know what to look for, so it can be a great time saver. The price may be prohibitively steep for novices or home users, but it's unquestionably worth the investment if you're buying for the office. Fireworks 4 is...um...interesting. I'm a Photoshop and Illustrator power-user, and must admit that I've been intrigued by Fireworks. If you're designing straight for the web, it's a great tool for the extra few bucks, but if you're doing print work too, stick with Photoshop. That being said, Fireworks does lots of cool stuff that neither Adobe program can do. A word of warning, though: Fireworks is a very full-featured application, and it may be a little overwhelming or confusing for novices. On the other hand, the robust feature set is balanced by an excellent help system and tutorials. Even Dreamweaver comes with an entire HTML reference book accessible from a palette in the interface. Nice touches like this really make this package shine.
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Summary: Simply THE best web dev combination
Review: DreamWeaver Rocks. Fireworks Rocks. Together they make for a spectacular web design/development combination. Dreamweaver is packed with features for the beginner through advanced web developer; it's easy and intuitive to use. It may take you a while to learn all the capabilities, but with each successive feature you discover and master, the development process becomes easier and faster. Fireworks is the best in class web graphics software. It integrates very well with DreamWeaver. Creating animated GIFs is a snap, as is image optimization (file compression), image map creation, and exploring full tables (HTML and all!) for use in DreamWeaver. You simply cannot go wrong with this package. Photoshop still has its place, but if you focus exclusively on the web and don't need to do exquisite image editing this bundle is all you need.
Rating:
Summary: Simply THE best web dev combination
Review: DreamWeaver Rocks. Fireworks Rocks. Together they make for a spectacular web design/development combination. Dreamweaver is packed with features for the beginner through advanced web developer; it's easy and intuitive to use. It may take you a while to learn all the capabilities, but with each successive feature you discover and master, the development process becomes easier and faster. Fireworks is the best in class web graphics software. It integrates very well with DreamWeaver. Creating animated GIFs is a snap, as is image optimization (file compression), image map creation, and exploring full tables (HTML and all!) for use in DreamWeaver. You simply cannot go wrong with this package. Photoshop still has its place, but if you focus exclusively on the web and don't need to do exquisite image editing this bundle is all you need.
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Summary: Almost perfect integration between the 2 Apps
Review: First of all I must say that i am a user of both this tools for quite some time and they do help me. I'm what you can call a coder, I like to know exactly what is written in the source code so that I can change it to my behalf. The problem with frontpage is that the code generated is very confusing and doesn't work very well on all browsers (although frontpage2000 improved a lot). With Dreamweaver 4 you can insert your code directly and see the effect on your webpage happen simultaneous or do the inverse, insert the things you want in your design view with macromedia's simple menu and subwindow system. The code dreamweaver generates is probably the best you can get using WYSIWYG web page builders. Fireworks is a graphics application almost totally directed to constructing and manipulating imagens for use in web pages. The interface is very simple and intuitive and the tools that are offered give you the power you need. The integration between the two applications is very simply and well done. This is suite to be used by both the beginner and the intermediate user. If you wish to construct dynamic webpages using Active Server Pages you should look for Macromedia Ultradev 4 or use Visual Interdev (included in the Visual Studio package).
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Summary: Stupidly Discontinued!
Review: Get Macromedia Dreamweaver 4. They have turned this once great web design package into a hybrid cross of something that looks like Netscape/Flash and called it Dreamweaver MX 2004. I used Dreamweaver MX 2004 for a month, uninstalled it and went back to Dreamweaver 4. It really is that terrible and the work space is terribly cluttered making it very hard to work within. Bottom Line -- Get Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 instead if you can find it. Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 is a very good web design package that knocks Dreamweaver MX 2004 for ten. You will simply hate Dreamweaver MX 2004 when you install it on your system. I nearly barfed after a month of using that *new* completely hostile and non-user friendly piece of unstable and slow excuse for a web design software program. Get this instead ... if you can find it...
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Summary: Wonderful! What a time saver!
Review: I decided I HAD to have Dreamweaver 4 after trying the Dreamweaver 3 demo software. And I think there is a big improvement over version 3. A lot of tweaks, here and there, that I couldn't live without! I love the easy Flash text and Flash buttons, how wonderfully Dreamweaver integrates with Fireworks (and if you download the extension, you can import ImageReady HTML as well). I know I haven't even scratched the surface of this wonderful program, but it is head and shoulders above any other WYSIWYG program I've used. And such wonderful resources! Plenty of Dreamweaver extensions to download, plenty of fun new things you can get it to do! I know how to do a little HTML, so I appreciate how I can "look under the hood" at my code with BBEdit, or with Dreamweaver's "split view" that shows both WYSIWYG, and code windows. So, even if you don't like to be far from the code, you can still find a lot to like about Dreamweaver. All I know is that because of the program, my web pages have a more polished appearance, and web authoring is easier and more seamless. The program runs fine on my little iMac, with OS 8.6. Though - if you want to run Dreamweaver *and* Fireworks/Photoshop at the same time, stock up on RAM! RAM is always a good thing.
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Summary: The best one-two punch for creating web sites
Review: I have taught classes and written class curriculum on the topic of web page generation, database interaction, and building web applications. When it comes to designing and building the standard professional web site with static pages (i.e., those that do not interact with databases in real time, which is most common professional "home page" sites), Dreamweaver is the de facto standard in the industry, and for good reason. This combination package is my favorite. Fireworks works as an alternative to Adobe Photoshop. While Photoshop is the ideal general image tool, Fireworks is designed specifically to help create web pages, and it provides automatic support and wizard-like features that make typical web design tasks automatic - such as building in multiple overlayed graphics effects, bursts, shadows, glows, 3-D, rollovers, etc. - but utomatically optimized for the web, rather than requiring you to thoroughly understand graphics optimization for multiple environments, including non-web environments. When you work with Photoshop, it takes some effort to make sure your cool Photoshop effect translates well to the web. When working with Fireworks, it's hard NOT to do that. Everything I've done in Fireworks always translates well. Furthermore, your work in Fireworks can automatically be imported into Dreamweaver in such a way that is more powerful than you would get with other tool combinations - the Fireworks/Dreamweaver transfer process will build Javascript code to support rollover effects and other features for menu support, dramatically speeding up the process. Dreamweaver is a drag-and-drop style HTML page design tool. In that regard, it can do the same things that the free Netscape Composer HTML design tool can do, but Dreamweaver does far, far more. You can work with layers, server side includes (SSI), libraries of Javascript effects (including your own - you can add to the library), and drag-and-drop HTML form design. You can build libraries of Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) styles, and apply them throughout your site, or pages, or as you see fit. Dreamweaver includes optional commands that will search your generated HTML code and format it, and strip out unused leftover tags. You can bring in HTML code that was generated from MS Word, and remove all of the unnecessary garbage that MS Word is known to do, which can dramatically reduce your file size. Dreamweaver includes some Javascript fixes that will address known browser problems, such as the "Netscape resize fix", but it will only include it if you wish. You can easily extend the menu to test your completed page in any and all browsers you have available to you. One of the most useful features for any web designer is the ability to survey the "Site Map", which is a graphic representation of all of your pages and their relationships to each other. Dreamweaver makes it easy to manage a site containing multiple static pages, and automatically search for hyperlinks that may be broken and need to be fixed. Anyone who has created large web sites will know how dramatic a time saver this is. As I said, I've been teaching classes in web design for years. I 've also run a company that offered web site hosting services. In my experience, my users and students who use Dreamweaver are consistently the most satisfied, and usually end up talking the MS Frontpage users into switching. Frontpage is good for getting a great looking site up and running quickly, but becomes very awkward when it's time to modify those sites. Other systems are a little too narrow, such as NetObjects Fusion, which is good for creating the standard business site of "about us / product list / contacts" combinations, but not much more. Dreamweaver seems to be the most popular choice for flexibility, ease of use, and extensibility. And it's my favorite, hands-down.
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