Which tool is better one?

In my 10 years of career, I have seen designer using Photoshop and dream weaver for designing website.

Can you tell me which is more convenient to use?
Photoshop
or
CSS

Please share your experiences.

 

Are you... okay, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and just assume you're clueless.
First: neither Photoshop, nor Dreamweaver, have anything to do with good web-design.
Second: CSS is used to style a webpage. Photoshop should NOT be used to mock-up a website, and really nothing else either. If you need images for the website, say icons or something, use Illustrator, which actually can create proper vector images.

 

Even if you use the mouth-breathing idiotic BS approach that is pushing pixels around in Photoshop and calling it "design" out of ignorance, sooner or later that goof assed picture HAS to be turned into HTML and CSS to be a website. PERIOD. If anything, dicking around in Photoshop lets you do a slew of things that are difficult or impossible to do on a website, or simply have no business in an ACCESSIBLE design. Photoshop does pixels, a website should be dynamic and elastic, two things pushing pixels around won't give you.

Similarly, if you're talking the WYSIWYG aspect of Dreamweaver, you will not have semantic markup meaning you can kiss rankings and accessibility goodbye, it's very unlikely you'd EVER approach anything remotely resembling responsive in design, and generally speaking the ONLY thing you can learn from Dreamweaver is how NOT to build a website. What it vomits up and has the unmitigated gall to call HTML if using the WYSIWYG, and the endless outmoded outdated scripttardery it slops all over the place if you let it do anything for you is so mind-numbingly idiotic, it is hard to fathom why ANYONE would use that overpriced slag heap by choice!

But one should never underestimate the raw power of ignorance, stupidity, and wishful thinking.

The people who dick around in Photoshop and call it design, and the people who mindlessly parrot "use dreamweaver" -- much like the ignorant halfwits who advocate the use of bloated trash like jquery and bootstrap -- know so little about HTML, CSS, emissive colourspace, or accessibility minimums that they have ZERO business flapping their gums about site development or design.

That many such fools call themselves "designers" is just ignorance on their part, as they universally lack the engineering knowledge to do anything more than ART... and sadly art is just a small part of design. If they don't understand dynamic fonts, elastic or semi-fluid layout, font minimums, rendering issues of low dpi targets, legible colour contrasts, or what is an is not practical in a design if your focus is to deliver content to users, then they are NOT designers no matter how much they may use the word to describe themselves.

Just look at the nube-predating scam bait that is off the shelf templates that fill up scam-artist laden whorehouses like ThemeForest and TemplateMonster. NOTHING on those sites meets even the simplest of accessibility norms, logical document structure, or properly formed semantics. They are a giant middle finger to large swaths of potential users.

In general, the whole IDEA of off the shelf templates is broken trash since it forces you to shoe-horn your content into the design, instead of being a design based on YOUR content. It's a back-assward approach to development and only the ignorance, apathy, and hopes of those duped into using them allow said SCAM to continue to lumber on like an unstoppable monster.

But again, the approach to site development I advocate involves taking your content -- or at bare minimum a reasonable facsimile of future content -- and organizing it in a flat text editor as if even HTML didn't exist so it makes sense. THEN you mark it up semantically using your HTML tags to say what things are, and NOT what you want them to look like. Once you have that baseline (since HTML is about delivering to more than just sighted users on screens) you use CSS to create your first of many layoutS -- plural because with responsive design in the mix the layout can/would/could/should change based on available screen space. I suggest starting with the legacy desktop layout as you can't target that with media queries. The whole "mobile first" thing is also utterly back-assward!. Then you adjust the window size and when the layout becomes unusable, figure out that width and adjust until you have all the sizes you could ever want from 192px to however wide you can make your content without it becoming hard to follow.

Bottom line dicking around drawing pretty pictures in Photoshop is NOT design, as it fails to take into account dozens if not hundreds of things a website should have and should be... and even if you take that broken dumbass approach to building a site, it STILL has to be turned into HTML and CSS, rendering your question meaningless gibberish.

It's like asking what's better, a picture of a futuristic car drawn by Ralph McQuarrie, or a Bugatti Veyron? Here's a tip, one of them can actually be driven down a road.

 

You guys just rip everyone apart in this forum that mentions photoshop. I've worked for quite a few different firms and companies and everyone separates the "design" and "coding". I feel like the people good at "design" don't think like a coder and it's way quicker/visual to mockup in photoshop. Its pretty obvious (not in a good way) when a website was "designed" in a code editor. This is coming from someone who designs his own sites in browser by the way.

Any decent "coder" should be able to build a responsive website based off a static photoshop mockup. If you can design in browser great, but don't discredit photoshop because you don't use it. It can be argued that your the one doing it backwards, it's like building a house without a blueprint.

 

Creating a mockup of a static image when building a website, IS ass-backwards. Unless you create mockups for every conceivable screen-size, showing different types of alignmetns, menu-types, buttons etc., you'll end up with having to do all the work anyway. Hence it's quite much quicker to create an idea (a basic mockup, perhaps) in photoshop, and then make a mockup of the site in actual code, showing how it transforms/works.

A photoshop mockup doesn't really do any of that. It just shows a static image. Good for showing a logo, maybe colors, but not for showing a webpage. I know that a lot of companies does it this way, but that doesn't mean they're right.

 

Totally disagree. I don't see why everyone's seeing it as a one person job. Does the construction worker design a house? Does the mechanic design a car? For the most part no one above the small business level does it this way, no firms do it this way. Of course there are people who can "design" AND "code" a website, but for the most part "coders" are poor at design and "designers" are poor at code. Feel free to show me some great designed websites designed in browser, I wouldn't consider any of ours one of them.

Any decent "coder" should be able to take a full width static mockup and fill in the gaps to make it responsive. I guess they blend a little bit. Literally every site I've coded I get sent a psd, wing it on the responsiveness then go over it with the "designer" and make changes.

 

I don't see where you're going with that or where you got that idea. Any but the smallest houses have specialists, e.g. coders, copywriters, information architects (IA), project managers and bringing up the rear, the graphic designers. Folks may wear multiple hats, but their functions are discrete and collaborative. The graphics designer is only involved in the page layout peripherally unless he understands affordance and eye progression.

Layout is determined primarily by the information architect, working with the copywriter. The IA has often studied library science, the science of organizing, documenting and presenting information. So what is the graphics guy's job? It is to carry forward or refactor the client's branding, i.e. stationery, signage, ads &c. to the web site. And, to implement all those accessibility issues @deathshadow harps on (with good reason). If he doesn't understand, he's not a professional graphic designer, but an artsy-fartsy wannabe.

The layout cannot be implemented until the content and desired eye-flow are determined. To 'design' the layout before (PS) or even while coding (DW) is plainly stupid.

gary

 

Only when they piss all over the web using it as a "design tool" -- it's a VERY good photo editor and graphics tool, but a design tool it isn't. It's for pixel pushing, pixel ideas, and more often than not results in "designs" that simply are not "viable for web deployment".

Then you've worked for sleazeball shits who've put the saddle on every last one of their clients and taken them for a ride, with fat bloated slow inaccessible train wreck websites that wholesale tell large swaths of users to go *** themselves!

Again, I'd LOVE to see one of these sites... then again, maybe not.. the horrors... oh, the horrors.

It's also AGONIZINGLY apparent when some PSD jockey thinks they are a designer, the way the resultant sites flip the double-bird at users with accessibility needs, users on restricted connections, users who don't meet their perfect match of pixel-perfect asshattery, send users diving for the zoom, and take so long to load you KNOW it's costing the poor sod owning the site two to three times what it should to host the resultant incompetent MESS!

After spending three weeks telling the designer "no, we can't do that. No, we can't do that either. No, you have no ***ing clue what you are talking about you ignorant Joe-blasted halfwit!" -- which is what should be the typical dialog with such alleged "designers".

No, it's more like hiring Pablo Picasso to make your architectural blueprint. It might be very artsy and avant garde, but that doesn't mean the resulting train wreck of ineptitude is going to be useful to users in the slightest.

ART is a small subset of design -- we have things like specifications, accessibility norms, bandwidth restrictions, user-experience and other engineering type elements that have to be incorporated into the design process; and plainly put, I've NEVER encountered a PSD jockey that could even manage concepts an ARTIST should understand like emissive colourspace, much less the simplest of accessibility minimums!

It's the same thing that happens when you hire some fancy artist under the DELUSION they are an architect; next thing you know you've got death-ray buildings cooking people on the street, by the pool, or in adjoining buildings; slabs of marble or glass careening onto the streets below; bridges that oscillate in even a slight breeze; or face cost overruns that still result in a building that needs to be condemned a week after being completed. (right MIT?)

Next thing you know you've got a Walkie-talkie or Plywood Palace on your hands. Seriously, just look at architectural "design" -- EVERY time you get some art {slur omitted} who comes up with some fancy unnaturally shaped "design" that's form over function, it's a disaster not just for them but anyone unfortunate enough to even be in the same vicinity...

... and that's the SAME BS as dicking around in Photoshop and calling it design. You are simply BEGGING for it to be a bloated, slow, inaccessible DISASTER filled with concepts more prone to frustrating a potential user than it is to do what's REALLY important on a site: DELIVERING CONTENT TO USERS!

I've NEVER seen a site that started life as a PSD that wasn't an unparalleled disaster on the code, speed, or accessibility fronts. PLEASE, prove me wrong; I've NEVER seen one!!!

... and EVERY time I say that, the only response is "Well I know what I'm talking about I don't have to prove it"

Admittedly, a lot of designed as code sites have similar failings, and that's most often from developers refusing to pull their heads out of 1997's ass, or being duped by nube-predating scam bait bullshit like jquery, bootcrap, OOCSS, or other mind-numbingly dumbass witless gormless nonsense.

Side note, congrats on sitechop, one of the few times I've ever had to zoom out to 80% to make a website usable... particularly love the complete lack of meaningful content above the fold what with that idiotic space-wasting banner nonsense and the giant black bar of nothing below it.

No joke, it's actually REFRESHING to have a site I have to zoom out to use. I'm pretty much used to 90%+ of the web forcing me to zoom in to 150% or more at this point... there's a reason I'm teaching myself to use a braille reader.

 

Photoshop is better then CSS just because of its advanced features and more styling features.

 

I am a web designer for a Professional Website Development Company and I personally used CSS. I just want to, I feel comfortable using it.

 

Both are good tools to work with. It depends on how flexible one feels while working with these tools.

 

Vote for PhotoShop!

 

I use them both. By the way what do you mean by Photoshop or CSS? (if you refer CSS as Cascading Style Sheets)
Photoshop is image editing/manipulating/creating software and CSS is a style sheet language. Both work well together I use them since Photoshop 7 and Dreamweaver still owned by Macromedia. And I use Dreamweaver only the text editor part and that's ashamed since I can do almost the identical thing for free using the mighty Notepad

Image optimization with Photoshop is also a fun thing to do since web loading speed is matter nowadays. And I still do that with my Photoshop 7 lol.

 

I have used Dreamweaver a lot to make great websites, it handles code in a great way and you have good control of HTML, CSS, PHP and so... Photoshop is used for creating single images only for a website and you can shrink the file size very much without losing quality. You can use it for jpg and png files. For SVG/Vector the preferred solution is Adobe Illustrator. I use WordPress for all my sites now because of the flexibility. But I always use to think of the usability and content in mind... that's what comes first, not to show that I am a graphic artist even if that's cool too sometimes. The latter may be the case if the web page is all about graphic artistry. Some solutions require a lot of graphics, but in most of the cases it is the content and ease of use that must be prioritized. Just look at Google and Facebook...

 

Methinks we probably have a different definition of the word "great".

 

Fixed that for you..

 

Do you have anyone made with Dreamweaver, that is great, that we could look at? Because, as @deathshadow said, I suspect we have different opinions on "great".

"It handles code in a great way"... what you need is a text-editor... there's no "handling" - except perhaps color-coding the text

You do know that Photoshop's "webfilter"/"web-settings" are NOT good, in any way, right? Repeated tests against other programs like Gimp shows that Photoshop both doesn't make the file as small as it is possible to do, and that "lossless" reduction is not as lossless. Granted, the tests were done with PS 6, so things might have changed.

There is very rare that a solution demands "lots of graphics" - for the design, that is. If you mean that a site might have lots of images embedded, sure, but there isn't really any need for graphics to make 99% of most webpages. (Granted, a few icons, like social pages and such needs images).

 

Wow this took off ... it's my experience I'm talking about. I agree that there are both advantages and disadvantages to using Dreamweaver, but do not come and tell that it is a bad program. I must admit that I did not use it so much today but I have nothing but good experiences with it. I use WordPress mostly today and will continue with it. When it comes to Photoshop I'm never going to stop using it because it gives me everything I need. Enough said.

P.S. Have a great day

 

Fine, it's not bad -- the word bad doesn't even do justice to what bloated, ignorant, halfwit SCAM ARTIST BULLSHIT is it . Bad is such a colossal understatement it would dwarf the great colossus; and if your "experience" differs on that, then you clearly do not know enough about HTML, CSS, progressive enhancement, graceful degradation, usability, accessibility, or anything of the dozens of other things a website should be to even be offering an opinion on the subject.

Same goes for Photoshop, great image editor, but for the love of Christmas use something else to save for web...

But... prove us wrong, let's see one of these allegedly "great" sites.

 

But... sorry. But saying you use Dreamweaver, and that it's "not a bad program"... it IS a bad program. It creates crappy code, it has built-in functions that only works with Dreamweaver-built pages, and so on and so forth. If you only use it as a text-editor, there are dozens if not hundreds of better tools out there. Wordpress has nothing to do with webdesign. It's at best a jigsaw puzzle where you get the pieces as you need them (plugins). Unless you are making your own themes / plugins, which I doubt you are.

Photoshop is brilliant for what it should be used for - photo manipulation and retouching. It shouldn't really be used for anything that has to do with webdesign. Webcontent, sure, if you're gonna add photos, but not the design-part.

That it gives you everything you need unfortunately only tells me that you don't really know enough about web-design, too quote @deathshadow , "to be flappin your gums about it". As an opinion piece, it's fine, but don't preach it as a gospel, because it's about as much worth as a preacher on the stage.