dreamweaver - why use it?

[suejoh]

Obviously people are using dreamweaver - so why do you use it?

In what ways it it helpful?

Just trying to decide if it is worth using in web development. Or shld I just stick to hand coding.

Thx

[ryanbutler]

Personally, if I didn't need to participate in rapid application development I probably wouldn't use it. Matter of fact, since I'm more in the programming arena, I use Visual Studio 2008 but it's a company license.

At my home computer, I use Visual Web Developer Express and it works fine for my needs. In other words, it helps with rapid application development and not giving me code I don't need.

About the only thing I see Dreamweaver gives is the rapid application development concept, beyond that, if you know what you're doing, it doesn't have much value in the programming arena, design, maybe more.

[suejoh]

That is what I thought it would be good for. If I am on my own doing websites then I need to be able to speed up what I do - so I just wondered what other people thought.

Thanks for replying. sue

[redglobe]

Dreamweaver's formatting usually slows me down. I find it faster to handcode and know for certain that unnecessary attributes, line-breaks, or crazy indents aren't messing me up along the way. Notepad++ makes things go pretty fast and the syntax highlighting is always nice. Dreamweaver is very good for starting out. If you're not sure what the available attributes are to an element, it does offer good auto-complete/suggestions.

Personally, I 'grew up' on Dreamweaver, and once I learned the semantics, structure, and attributes to each element, I switched to handcoding (and reuse common blocks of code, such as Eric Meyer's reset, basic html doctype/keywords/meta-info, etc.)

[tracknut]

I don't use Dreamweaver, I use Expressions, but I think they're fairly similar. There are many components to the web development process that both these tools provide, that help speed up the process. Managing multiple sites, global edits, testing against php services, FTP, and I'm sure more. Just because you use these tools does not mean you give up hand coding - I'm sure most professional programmers still hand code with these tools.

So the question is whether the tool set you have now is providing all the features you need, or whether your development process would be improved by having them.

Dave

[suejoh]

thanks all. I will read through some books and see how I get on with it. Have also joined Lynda.com so will go through some of the tutorials there.
Sue

[kiwibrit]

Personally, if I didn't need to participate in rapid application development I probably wouldn't use it. Matter of fact, since I'm more in the programming arena, I use Visual Studio 2008 but it's a company license.

At my home computer, I use Visual Web Developer Express and it works fine for my needs. In other words, it helps with rapid application development and not giving me code I don't need.
.....

Do you ever find that you are limited in what can be done with Visual Web Developer Express? So far I have found it very powerful, and am not clear what benefit there would be in buying Visual Studio

[Kuriyama]

Do you ever find that you are limited in what can be done with Visual Web Developer Express? So far I have found it very powerful, and am not clear what benefit there would be in buying Visual Studio

If you purchase Visual Studio you will get a lot more team functionality, where as the express version is more or less meant to be used in a small/single development team setting.

[kiwibrit]

Thanks. At the moment I am developing solo - so I guess I'll stick with VWD.

[rnd me]

dreamweaver sucks for wywiwyg, and is just "ok" as a text editor.
Its power lies more in it's file management than anything else.

link re-writing, site-wide find and replace, library items, and the like make it irreplaceable.

avoid anything spry and dreamweaver-regurgitated javascript like the plague.