Dreamweaver 4.0 [OLD VERSION]

by Macromedia

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000050F96
• Item model number: DWW40D01
• Date first available at Amazon.com: November 13, 2000
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,618 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #21 in Software > Web Development > Web Page Editors > WYSIWYG
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

Some folks pour Web code from their soul using nothing more than a simple text editor. Others avoid code altogether by building pages in a WYSIWYG editor's visual interface. Whatever one's preferences, Macromedia's Dreamweaver 4 delivers a powerful collection of features for building and maintaining even the most complex sites.

Since its initial launch, Dreamweaver has charmed Web developers with an easy-to-use yet versatile editing environment. Boasting an impressive collection of resources for both hand coders and visual layout designers, complex code is cleanly served up via a powerful visual layout editor or a text editor that inspects source code. In-depth features that create forms, Flash files, frames, cascading style sheets, Java, and ActiveX files are perfectly integrated into the application. For professional Web development crews, a multiuser environment efficiently manages the fast-paced flow of page content updates. Add an ever-growing Web community offering hundreds of extensions that automate and simplify the development process, and it's easy to see why Dreamweaver is a favorite Web-authoring tool.

Dreamweaver 4 offers a fresh set of features, upgrades, and improvements. Already a great visual editor, Dreamweaver 4 pumps up its hand-coding capabilities with a new Code View feature--a text editor with such customizable features as live syntax coloring, tag balancing, and auto indenting. In Split View, the Code and Design views display simultaneously, providing the best of both worlds for novice and pro coders alike. A Code Reference feature provides a thorough guide to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Graphic designers will enjoy Dreamweaver 4's seamless integration with other Macromedia products, such as Fireworks and Flash. One now can create editable vector graphics--Flash buttons and text--directly in Dreamweaver, a feature we found particularly useful.

Current users might want to consider taking a close look at Macromedia's Dreamweaver 4 Web site to ensure that the collection of new features warrants an upgrade this time around. New users, especially Web-building novices, may find the initial learning curve a bit steep, though frequent visits to the help files are well worth the enormous power this program yields. --Eric Twelker

Product Description

Dreamweaver 4 is everything that you need to create and manage small business sites, corporate Intranets, and complex Web businesses. Familiar page-layout techniques let you "draw" complex table-based layouts with pixel-precise accuracy, while generating clean, version-3.0-friendly table code. Professional hand-coding environment includes autoindenting, punctuation balancing, and the ability to debug client-side JavaScript directly in your browser. And, if you're ready to master the nuances of HTML, you can refer to the integrated online reference material from O'Reilly Publications. Dreamweaver 4 makes it simple to incorporate content from Microsoft Office and graphics from Macromedia Fireworks. You can even generate Macromedia Flash (.swf) graphics directly in Dreamweaver to create engaging Web experiences. Working on teams and tracking projects is easier, too. Quickly organize site assets, create sitewide reports, and integrate with WebDAV and Microsoft Visual SourceSafe for Windows for maximum productivity.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The most powerful website management program, January 16, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Dreamweaver 4.0 [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

If you have used Dreamweaver before, you know its possibilities. However, if you had a brief adventure with Adobe GoLive, or have been a longtime user of Microsoft FrontPage, and finally if you are new to HTML, you might consider reading this review, which is tailored for you.

REMARKS FOR HTML NOVICES
There are many ways to learn HTML, and you probably heard that there are programs which allow you to construct web pages using a visual, graphical interface, instead of monkishly writing the code. Whereas you can start from scratch, purchase a HTML compendium and then use a pure text editor to write your own code, it's not the most efficient way of doing things. Dreamweaver offers you a powerful interface, which combines all possible ways of doing the same thing. First of all, like many editors out there, it has a mode of workspace, which allows you to write the pure code. If something is wrong, it will highlight the erroneous tags and text commands you have typed. It offers tools, which clean up the code you wrote. Whatever you coded, you can always switch to 'visual' design mode, where you see what you designed. In other words, if you drew a table, the design mode will show you a table as it will look on the web, and then you can click the "code" button to see how Dreamweaver used HTML to write correct information about that table. This way, you can quickly and efficiently learn HTML, because you see it at work, and can stop at any time to see why this was coded in such and such way. The uniqueness of Dreamweaver is that it offers you the third mode, combining both the design mode and code mode. Clicking the third button, your screen is split horizontally into two windows, and in one you see the code, in another you see the real thing. In the code window, Dreamweaver simultaneously codes whatever you do in the visual window. In effect - you see the changes made in real time, which is even better for learning HTML. That's not all! The latest version of software offers a small panel, a little window, which can be hidden and shown at any time, using the launcher, a small set of icons on the status bar. There, you can look at any HTML tag, and get a full explanation (Reilly Reference) of what it does, and all possible switches and parameters used for a given tag. Also, any option called from the menu of the program has a handy HELP button, which will take you directly to the part of extensive help system of the program, where you are presented with all explanations, including screenshots. This means you will not have to search yourself, since as a novice, more often than not you won't know what you're looking for. Dreamweaver makes it easy. There is no user-friendlier program for novices that Macromedia's Dreamweaver. It's also inexpensive.

PALETTES and ERGONOMICS: Dreamweaver offers incredible set of tools for a seasoned web-designer. The same thing can be done in many ways, depending on your level of proficiency. Just like Adobe's GoLive, Dreamweaver uses floating, customizable palettes of tools - but where the two programs differ, is the actual ergonomics of palettes. In GoLive, it's very hard to work normally, unless you have two-monitor system. If the palettes are hidden, you have no way of using them, since many commands are not available elsewhere. Wherever you push the palette, it jumps back when you switch from code view to design view. In Dreamweaver, palettes stay where you want them to stay, and each palette has tabs, which save space, offering different set of tools depending on a tab. They take little space, and can be called into the screen in many ways, not to forget the always-present launcher at the task-bar.

CSS, LAYERS, OBJECTS, EXTENSIONS: Dreamweaver offers incredible integration of HTML with CSS. Instead of formatting each paragraph by hand, you can specify a set of settings once, and then simply attach a CSS file to your document, and everything will be formatted according to the specification. You need to do this once, and then updating a 300-page website requires... changing a small text file, which you can do by hand, or using a very easy CSS edit tool. If you think of expanding your site from a one-page site you wrote in FrontPage, you will find it extremely useful. Sophisticated code can be virtually "drawn" in Dreamweaver, using layer view. Drawing a table with a mouse, adding an overlapping table with pictures, scrolling text areas, and many DHTML goodies is a snap. The program will translate your drawing into proper code. Using a palette, or a menu, you can insert objects of any type, including applets, JavaScript, Flash movies, Flash buttons, encrypted email links, and images. Dreamweaver includes a special extensions manager, which installs numerous extensions available via the Macromedia website. This allows a user to add commands, tools, scripts, objects, templates, and many other tools.

VERIFICATION: The program forces you to write good code, and if you work in design view, it will generate excellent HTML code, which will be hassle-free for any browser. You also have a wide array of verification tools, including HTML cleanup, World Wide Web specification verifier, and last but not least, browser compatibility tool, which allows you to double-check cross-browser compatibility. This way you can ensure that everyone will see what you intend them to see. That's what past FrontPage users will find invaluable, since they are probably used to complaints that their FrontPage-generated output is messy, error-prone, and incompatible. Another verification tool is the site management menu, which can be accessed directly, or via the launcher, which opens a separate window, where you can modify the navigation, check and modify the links sitewide, replace links, text and anything.

39 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Improvement On Perfection., December 23, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Dreamweaver 4.0 [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

While it seemed web design using Macromedia Dreamweaver 3 could'nt get any better, Dreamweaver 4 comes along and has managed to improve on a program that was already near flawless!

Dreamweaver 4 simply is a must buy (yes even if you have 3), it features very fluent fireworks/dreamweaver integration, a very convenient source code & design simultaneous view ability, the ability to create flash objects right within dreamweaver, improved layout, a customizable interface, and a continuous wealth of extra's that make complex web design with dreamweaver 4 almost completely automated!

Anyone who has even begun to consider this product as a web editing choice should definitely go ahead and purchase this product because it has so much quality to offer that there is literally no room to go wrong.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best WYSIWYG Webdesign program available, September 27, 2001

By 

"[e-mail]" (Madison, Wisconsin) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dreamweaver 4.0 [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

Dreamweaver has possibly one of the easiest interfaces that you could ask for in a webdesign program. I have been using DW since version 3 came out and i have not had one complaint about it. This program is leaps and bounds ahead of MS Frontpage 2002. If you still have doubts you are in luck because this is a macromedia product and as with almost any macromedia product you can download a full version as a 30 day trial to see if you like it.