Dreamweaver or Rapidweaver?

deathshadow,

I understand that you may feel like its a mass produced product but the fact that many people in the industry use it means that at some point you'll have to have knowledgeable about the product and it's features and if you get a job working in the industry it's likely the product you'll have to use for any ad agency or corporate marketing business.

Thus, you should probably take note. Doesn't mean it's the best product nor the only one - it means that it's had a large adoption rate and therefore cannot be ignored. If you're going to take the time to learn a product, why not learn the product that's going to provide you with the most benefits - and yes by benefits I mean the most real-world career opportunities.

 

Or you could fight it's adoption and educate people on what a pile of trash it is, waste of money it is, and how it's responsible for more broken bloated websites built with outdated methodologies than even Frontpage accomplished.

I really pity anyone DUMB ENOUGH to actually spend money on it, much less WASTE THEIR TIME using it.

When to use it in a meaningful manner all you are doing it gutting it down to being a flat text editor with a preview pane, open up an ACTUAL browser (since the preview pane tends to be broken compared to real browsers ANYWAYS) and any of the half-billion free text editors.

 

yes, let's be naive and not live in the real-world and try to move the immovable object. please educate us oh wise deathshadow - lead us to the web design promise land (hopefully we don't starve, is there a McDonald's on the way?)

truth is there are lots of things in the world we may not agree with but you've got to pick and choose your battles and choosing the battle of let's talk the entire industry out of using the most popular web design tool is not only ill-advised, that battle is already over.

 

I prefer dreamweaver beacuse i think it has all that i need plus its very easy to work with.

 

I use dreamweaver every day, highly recommend it
just ignore deathshadow, he's nothing more than a troll
lol@ him quoting a "PM" 2 years old..LMAO

 

for me dreamweaver is the best

 

Ah, "wanna dance?"

Is that how you ended up with a 1.3 MEGABYTE blog in 92 files that takes 40 seconds to load on a 22mbps connection to deliver 12k of plaintext?

How about a website with no images off degradation, a miserable /FAIL/ on accessibility because of the absurdly undersized px metric fonts, 12k of markup for 3k of content that has nothing fancier applied to it than padding and faux-columns? Poor/nonexistant css off degradation? Nonsensical heading orders?

Oh yes, and let's LOL at my quoting a priceless gem from a respected member of the community who passed away last month. You might want to check your math too.

Jackass. Yeah, and I'm the **** troll. Maybe you'd have preferred another quote of his that's more recent? "The only thing about Dreamweaver that can be considered professional grade tools are the people promoting it's use." - That better?

 

Thanks for all the helpful replies. I should have mentioned that at my current "ripe old age" (66) , the steep learning curves of the more complex programs are not too appealing.

I'm gathering from the posts and from online reviews that Dreamweaver offers more but is fairly complex, while Rapidweaver is a lot easier to get up to speed in, but is less advanced in what it can do. I'll have to keep chewing on this one, meanwhile continuing to use my present software (Freeway). Thanks to all.

 

At that point, if you are doing little personal websites then any of the alternatives presented would be more than adequate since you'd not care about accessibility, SEO or a half dozen other things professional developers care about. If you are just putting information out there and are not developing to promote a product, push sales, or have any sort of marketing involved, then most of what's been said in this thread doesn't matter.

If Dreamweaver looks like too much of a curve, go with the simpler one - though you might want to consider using some form of content management system and outsourcing your theming at that point. You're on a Mac anyways so it's not like you are going to be doing a lot of cross-platform testing unless you are willing to get very technical running virtual machines or dual booting.

Just beware that it's unlikely that without learning to do your HTML and CSS directly bypassing the WYSIWYG aspects of either program that your pages will look right anywhere but on the Mac and in a handful of browsers. If you aren't going to be diving into the code (which is where the true learning curve is) you might as well go with the simpler (and cheaper) of the two programs, since at that point everything else is a non-issue. (or is an issue you're unwilling/unable to spend time addressing)

 

Hi Jim,

I'm glad to see people that are a little more "seasoned" are out there learning new crafts and delving into web design.

I wish you the best of luck - keep us posted on your decision and how you like your new software.

 

without a doubt - Dreamweaver is the way to go. Been using it for 8 years now

 

Dreamweaver is the best IMO, have been developing sites for years with it.

 

Dreamweaver all the way! I haven't really found any faults with it, it includes all of the features you would expect in a piece of software like that, and there's really no hassle or complaints I have with it. Granted the Adobe pricetag comes steep, but Adobe makes some top-of-the-line software