Mar
30
2007
There is a horrible disservice being perpetrated on young web designers and web design students: that learning Dreamweaver is anything but irrelevant to your needs. We are in a Web 2.0 world, where semantic CSS and clean xhtml are the standard. And yet university art and design departments continue to push Dreamweaver as some sort of useful skill. We see Dreamweaver knowledge listed at the top of a frighteningly large percentage of applications for web design positions at pingVision. (Personally, I'd rather receive an enthusiastic note about the ideas in Andy Clarke's Transcending CSS or William Lidwell, Kritina Holden and Jill Butler's Universal Principles of Design.)
What's perhaps more disheartening is that we see such backward-looking thinking in the top-line offerings from the king of design software companies, Adobe.
Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Standard
The basic toolkit for web designers and developers, Adobe® Creative Suite® 3 Web Standard software features all-new versions of the fundamental tools for creating and maintaining interactive websites, applications, and mobile device content. Prototype your projects, design assets, and build and maintain professional web experiences. Work on your choice of Mac or Windows®.Combines Adobe Dreamweaver® CS3, Flash® CS3 Professional, Fireworks® CS3, Contribute® CS3, Bridge CS3, Version Cue® CS3, and Device Central CS3.
As a web designer, I look at this offering and shrug with frustration. Aside from Bridge and perhaps Fireworks, I have no use for any of these applications. It's just not relevant to the requirements of web design these days.
When it comes to theming for Drupal or any other content management system or even basic blog system, what you need are decent graphic design tools (such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks...) and a proper text editor (BBEdit, TextWrangler, TextMate...).
If you're a student or just starting out in web design, my recommendation is to order the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Standard. Unless you're a Flash artist, the "Web Design" packages are just a waste of disk space.
- Company: Web Design
- Tags: software, Adobe, CSS, design, best practices, Drupal, tools
Comments
Greg writes:
As an open source/cross platform fanatic I have a few of my own ideas to add some diversity in the software recommendations ;)
For "design tools" don't forget Inkscape and Gimp. For a proper text editors vim, xemacs, and Eclipse will work quite well.
Steve McKenzie writes:
FINALLY someone says it. Today I was doing my daily rounds on my news reader and came across an article about CS 3 and the new features Dreamweaver has.
I laughed. what a joke.
Folkert writes:
Well if you are flash designer or developer there is also no use for dreamweaver. While more and more site show the default javascripts dreamweaver generates it's a bit like frontpage, both cannot do the job on them selfs and more work needs to be done afterward then when you just open a regular editor and make yourself a xhtml and css.
Agree on fireworks as an amazing quick tool to let customers see what all is going to look like. But then again if you only want flash or another product you can buy them apart instead of one of the six 'suites'
Big mistake to think you can build websites if you can use dreamweaver :D
blamcast writes:
Does it do CSS layouts yet? Last time I tried it, it was still using tables. Yuck.
Kenneth Berger writes:
Have you tried Dreamweaver out recently? You might be surprised. I know some folks think of it only as a graphical web design tool, but we've drastically improved the code editing environment over the past few releases. In fact, the vast majority of people who use Dreamweaver spend some or all of their time in "Code" view--many of them writing lovely semantic CSS and XHTML.
As a result of that, we've taken great pains to make sure that Dreamweaver's key features work as well (or better) in Code view than Design view. CS3 is no exception: in code view you can automatically detect common browser bugs, paste images directly from Photoshop, and take advantage of extensive code hinting with the Spry framework for Ajax. We even have extensive commenting in our CSS-based layouts to help those new to CSS layout learn how it works.
As far as semantic CSS and clean XHTML: well, semantics are about meaning, so Dreamweaver can't guess them for you--they come from the person creating the page. Dreamweaver is like every other editor in that you can write good or bad code in it--the difference lies in how DW helps you be more efficient at what you do know and learn what you don't. Anyway, give the trial a whirl when it's released: believe it or not, Dreamweaver is a great coding tool.
Laura writes:
But on your invitation, I'll give it a try when I have a chance.
Kenneth Berger writes:
Thanks, much obliged! You can sign up to be notified when the trials are posted here: http://www.adobe.com/go/cs3_notifyme
guest writes:
Sorry, but I didn't learn anything useful from your rant that started this thread. You are obviously frustrated and wanted to vent, but it would have been more helpful if you had made a well reasoned argument against DW and for the alternatives. You seem to assume that DW is obsolete because everyone is, or should be, using a CMS. That is nonsense. You may not realize that most professionals develop mostly in the DW Code View because of its excellent support for XHTML and CSS editing. The Design View is helpful at times too. You would be more effective and helpful if you simply expressed your preferences. It's your blog, so you can have fun trashing and ranting (but this reader won't visit again).
Laura writes:
Well reasoned arguments are appreciated and welcome. I thought I was clear from my post as to where I was coming from.
As for using Dreamweaver for code editing, it does strike me as a rather expensive choice given the numerous affordable and free alternatives out there. And when someone puts Dreamweaver on their resume, in my experience more than 9 times out of 10 those skills do not come with an understanding of xhtml or css. No, they are not mutually exclusive, but if you know xhtml and css, Dreamweaver's value becomes less apparent, at least in my humble opinion.
Thanks for visiting!
Elaine writes:
I started out learning web design in Dreamweaver and I found the whole process very frustrating until I started working in the the split design/code view. Soon after that taste of what is really going on in the code, I concentrated on learning HTML and CSS by writing it in Notepad. For what it's worth, learning to hand code semantically correct, content-and-style separated web sites was emphasized by my college in spite of the first class being a "Dreamweaver" class.
After using a text-editor pretty much exclusively to design my next few sites, I found myself working DW back into some aspects of the design and especially the maintenance of my web sites; a few of the tools like validation, browser bug check, library and ftp tools are really time savers. All that aside, I know that DW will never be a part of my primary design process, and that is OK by me!
guest writes:
Wow. It's cool.
themegarden.org writes:
Looking at Adobe's marketing I wouldn't be surprised if one day web designers become "dreamweavers". Hopefully that day won't come, ever.