Customer Reviews

Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 Win/Mac [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Dreamweaver consistently ranks high in the field of WYSIWYG web site editors. This release does not stray from this position. Considering GoLive and FrontPage are the current competition, it is not hard to see why (will be interesting to see what comes out with Microsoft Expressions Quartz).

As with previous versions, Dreamweaver 8 has the standard Dreamweaver interface. When you install, you have the option of setting up like a developer or setting up like a designer. It is not as easy to change the scheme (or not as evident), but this is not a major deal as a single developer rarely changes the setup of his development environment.

Dreamweaver 8 touts itself as the king of CSS and it has certainly made some wonderful inroads. By default, you can create styles in a page or in a stylesheet. Unfortunately, it falls a little short in allowing you to change your mind in this place, as well. It would be nice, for example, to drag tested styles from a test page up to the stylesheet. Instead, I have to manually cut and paste or recreate styles. Yes, this is minor, but can't someone make a tool that does this? I would also love to see a tool that recognizes I have already created a style with the same feature or allows me to use the standard font and paragraph changes and automatically create a style. But, I digress, there is no tool that does that ... yet.

The CSS Styles tab gives you a great way of getting down to the properties of a particular CSS style. If you do not want to bring up the designer, which is how you normally create your style, you simply add properties to the style in the CSS Styles tab. Very nice feature. A little different than the properties view in MS products, but much more compact.

Dreamweaver 8 is better at .NET development than FrontPage. It also allows a variety of other development paradigms: ASP (either VBScript or JavaScript), ASP.NET (C# or VB.NET), ColdFusion, JSP and PHP (with MySQL). This makes it a good all around tool for development. I would still not trade my Visual Studio, but Dreamweaver gives me a lot of bang for my buck and Visual Studio has a horrible design surface (at least in the latest implementation - VS 2005).

Dreamweaver still has the best behaviors (client side scripting), but they have not made any real inroads to new functionality in this regard. This has been a major selling point to me in the past and I wish they would have included something to help with AJAX (Asynch JavaScript and XML).

Of the new features, I find the CSS most compelling (mentioned above) and also very aggrevating (Macromedia did not take them far enough for my likings). You also have the ability to zoom on design and use guides (good for CSS layouts). There is also a better Flash integration and collapsable code regions. None of these are grand enough for me to personally take the upgrade plunge.

Down to the nitty gritty. Here are the questions you are probably wanting to know the answer to.

1. Should you buy Dreamweaver (assuming you do not already own a previous version)? It really depends. If you do not have a tool, this is still the best on the market. If you have FrontPage, you might get Dreamweaver if you need the flexibility of working outside of the Microsoft world, otherwise I would say no. The same is true if you have GoLive, as it has many similar features.

2. Should you upgrade? This really comes down to a few features and how important they are to you.

A) If you are heavy on CSS, you might want to upgrade, although I am not sure that this is the best option unless Macromedia really fills in this area. It was not quite enough for me to feel compelled to move on right now.

B) Use a lot of flash? The time savings might be a good reason to move to this version.

C) Need productivity helps, like code collapse, guides and the ability to zoom in on your design? This is the only tool I know of currently that has these features.

Dreamweaver 8 is a good product. If I did not have a previous version, I would seriously consider the cost and bite the bullet, as I feel it is worth the price ($399 street). But, I do not see it worth the $199 street price for the upgrade, aty least not for me. The additional CSS is nice, but it is not enough of a productivity change for me to justify the cost, esp. when I am fairly fast at working with CSS without the additional features.

I have recently become more serious about web page design. I looked at other products and tried them out. However, Dreamweaver has exceeded my expectations. I am not an advanced user by any means, so my rating might have a "new user bias" to it. My first web site used a WYSIWYG editor similar to Frontpage. Then, I downloaded the 30 day trial of Dreamweaver and redesigned the site. Productivity greatly increased and the interface is very easy to navigate, once you get used to it. The new web site is by far more impressive, user friendly, and feature rich without a cut in productivity. Learning Dreamweaver is a pleasure. If you are familiar with web design, the learning curve is very nice. I was making web pages within a couple of hours of downloading the trial. Tutorials are readily available in the Help menu and on the Adobe web site. Of course, you can always find a good book here on Amazon. If the price of Dreamweaver can fit your budget and you are serious about making impressive web sites, I highly recommend the consideration.

Pros: code editor is improved, good idea with the FTP background capabilities, love the new zoom feature

Cons: Macromedia put this out hastily, bugs in the FTP, the file times aren't correct, can't use it in a professional enviornment, no word of when updater will be available

I think Macromedia raced to get this one to market. I've been using Dreamweaver since version 2. It's a powerful tool that has evolved into something close to remarkable concerning development of professional web sites/applications. But...

If you have Dreamweaver MX 2004, you have a better version of Dreamweaver than version 8. I can't use 8 in a professional environment due to the way that it stamps file times incorrectly. Collegues are left wondering what the real time was that a page was last worked on. Sometimes the FTP doesn't upload the files that are selected. In a professional environment, this is a major quirk - imagine trying to move 100 files and 10 of them don't make it. You've got to go through all of them to figure out which ones didn't. I've never seen this from another version of Dreamweaver. .

I was hooked by the marketing presentations from Macromedia. I'm glad that Adobe bought them out because the way that the company looked in the end wasn't the same as the first few years I was using their products. But I am afraid of what Adobe will do to the Macromedia suite. KEEP YOUR MX2004 STUDIO. It may contain the last stable version of Dreamweaver. I can imagine working on web sites for the next 5 years with MX2004. If DW8 gets a good update, then I would recommend getting it at that point because the new features are really cool and worth the upgrade if you are in a professional environment. If not, then you may not even notice them.

No doubt, DREAMWEAVER is in a league of its own... its unrivaled... sets the standards and unless you're a master of freehand code *essential* for designing a professional e-commerce level website (say similar to the one you're now visiting!) So why the 3 stars...? well, despite the fact that its recently been added as part of the CREATIVE SUITE upgrade (meaning lot's of former GO LIVE users will be jumping over) it comes (get this...) WITHOUT an instruction manual... which to me is a bit of an insult. Of course you can access the information by going to the HELP menu or downloading the supporting documentation online, but I hate to say this... some people like myself actually like to read and study training manuals when they're away from the computer, some even like to sit on the toilet and read, even read on planes and lavish a few moments of their life NOT staring into a computer screen (*and this is coming from a bonified net addict!) Being told "Just go to our website and print it out..." is a bit arrogant - - especially considering that the features in DREAMWEAVER go well beyond any of the other programs out there and do require study if you really want to master the program. - - I'm confused, is the aim to save the rainforest, or make an extra buck? I wonder how many people reading this wouldn't mind paying the extra money for a printed manual (which a member of the advisory team has actually made and is also selling on AMAZON) ??? - - Maybe I'm just whining and complaining... maybe people who've already been using the product don't need one anyway... but I wonder if I'm the only person who is very upset about this ???

If you use a lot of CSS DW8 is fantastic. This is a huge headache saver and time saver for CSS developers. In my mind the price for a new DW 8 will quickly be made up in saved development time.

On the otherhand plan on SLOW development. Adding this to your system (like MX) is like tying an anchor to your desktop or stepping back five or six years in the computer world. From what blogs & reviews I have read it aint a RAM issue, this is just slow. I am on Mac OS X 10.3.9

Still if you are a web dev DW is king, personally I wouldn't give it up for anything but the perfomance issues must be addressed.

I am not a web designer by profession, but I still wanted to produce good looking websites as part of my personal business. Dreamweaver 8 is easy to learn and powerful, much better than MS Front Page and worth every penny. Even if you don't know how to read or write code, Dreamweaver will do most all of the work for you using an easy graphical interface. The tutorial also is very helpful for first time designers and explains almost everything you will want to do.

Having used Dreamweaver for many years, as both a design and coding (PHP) tool... it was wonderful to begin using 8 and right away noticing the MAJOR improvements.

Most noteably it seems that they got rid of a lot of the "bloat" that made MX so sluggish. Another major plus is the posting window that puts along in the background, freeing DW up to continue working on other things.

Thoroughly impressed so far. Have not played too much with new CSS support but looking forward to seeing improvements there as well.

I had been using dreamweaver 4 forever. I had upgraded to MX but could not stand it. MX once opened for the first time you look at it and go "what the hell is going on here" nothing was where you thought it would be, I am pretty sure the designers were drunk. So I went back to using 4. Just got 8 and it is smooth and easy. Things are much different but all better in so many ways. I like programs that you do not have to look at the instructions when you upgrade to a new version. They realy put some thought into making it very intuitive. Go for it and dont look back. Avoid MX like the plague it is though.

This version of Dreamweaver is mounds better than 2004. It loads just as fast as MX did, runs flawlessly and stable, just like MX did. MX 2004 sucked, plain and simple. It was buggy, slow, and it had all that activation crap processes running in the background. I must have counted a total of 3 extra processes running just for Dreamweaver to run. Just for the crappy licensing. CSS has been better intergrated and so has flash video. This is definetly worth the upgrade. Being as how adobe just bought macromedia, i imagine the versions are only going to get crappier since adobe has no competition now. So i'd upgrade to this one while you have the chance, as no other web editing software really compares to dreamweaver.

I love Dreamweaver--I'm medium-level computer literate, nothing fancy, but DW is so easy to use I can set up websites for home and business. This new version no longer works with Windows 98, so if you have that, get the older MX version. But there is nothing wrong with the newest version otherwise!