Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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101 of 103 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Still the best of the WYSIWYG field, November 1, 2005
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.
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54 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dreamweaver fits the bill..., July 28, 2006
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.
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39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Marketing Hype - MX2004 is More Stable/Professional, December 6, 2005
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.
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