Hello. I am a college student in a beginning web design class. Dreamweaver is taught in this class but I hear a lot of people say they don't like Dreamweaver. When I am finished with the class; what would anyone suggest I learn in place of Dreamweaver? Thanks! Jeannine
Web Design Class? Please, for the love of God, tell me that you are not using Dreamweaver as a WYSIWYG editor! If you are using it just as a text editor, then it`s ok. Learn HTML+CSS and learn hot to use Photoshop if you are a web designer.
I'll go a step further and say that any instructor that teaches 'web design' using Dreamweaver or Photoshop as a design tool is incompetent, heavily subsidized by Adobe or both. Even used a text editor, DW is marginal for professional use. There are too many decent text editors, available for free, to be using an expensive, mediocre Dreamweaver. Photoshop is not a design tool. Its function is as an image manipulation program; in other words, for preparing graphical content and decoration. gary
Never underestimate the all-mighty power of the kickback, or the ability of a teacher to pack themselves full of shit into the DELUSION they are qualified to teach anyone else a blasted thing. @kk5st and @HCFGrizzly are being polite, and to be frank if you are paying for said class, I'd suggest asking for the money back now. Particularly if they have you dicking around drawing goofy pictures or dragging and dropping crap on the screen without having first covered accessibility norms or semantic markup FIRST. If you have a look at my tools of the trade article: http://www.cutcodedown.com/article/tools_of_the_trade You'll see I list a few simple text editors first -- that's all you should REALLY need for site development and if they aren't teaching you that, they're teaching you wrong! Admittedly, with the discounts and kickbacks Adobe gives to schools it's become a bit like Apple in the 1980's and 1990's, where they are basically buying their way to relevance even though not one serious professional would even give their products a second look. As a dearly departed friend used to say, "From strictly a web development point of view the only thing from Adobe that can be considered professional grade tools are the people promoting the use of their products!"
Adobe's products are the norm for a lot of creative work - it's hard to not need to know Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and all the others, if you're gonna be doing graphical design - but that has almost NOTHING to do with webdesign. As others have mentioned, what you need for webdesign is a good, working text-editor, fitting your need. You might want syntax highlighting, or not, you might want code-completion, or not, and so on and so forth. Any decent text-editor lets you select which functionality you want to be using at any time. Some even allows for more complex operations, like building code, built-in FTP-programs and so forth. Dreamweaver is crap, and should be avoided like the plague. It's that simple. And as other's have stated, if the teacher uses it, drop out. Find another course. Seriously. It means the teacher most likely have no clue what s/he is doing.
Hello Jeannine, I am also taking a web design class, we use Textwrangler (for mac) and Notepad++ (windows). I suggest giving those a try, they are free and easy! - Textwrangler: http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/ - Notepad++: https://notepad-plus-plus.org
I like most Dreamweaver features customizable palettes, floating dialog boxes, and toolbar, and as part of Adobe’s Creative Suite
DreamWeaver is one of the best tool for entry level desinger if you are expert in dreamweaver then switch other software.
Hey OP, I am studying media informatics and here are my preferences: Sublime Text - great workflow but basically just a text editor (paid, but worth the price) Brackets - open source code editor for web designers and front-end developers, supported by Adobe (free) PHPStorm - great software if you also plan to code php, etc. and not just html/css (paid, but free licenses for students) And do not listen to those people here that say Dreamweaver is great. I made acquaintance of many webdesigners and no one takes Dreamweaver seriously