What is Dreamweaver

Hi my name is Dan and in this video we are going to look at where does Dreamweaver sit in the grand scheme of web design.

Okay so there’s three main positions. There this side which is things like Muse or Weebly. And they are totally wizzywig, open the program, drag and drop and hit export website. Very visual but not a lot of customization, if its not built into the product, you can’t do it. Muse is amazing and I love it and I've got lots of sites in it but it has, you get to your limit quite quickly, so no customization. Where over here you’ve got full customization, full code.It’s for people who like to see in code. I don’t like this side of things, I can dabble in it, but this side of things is for if you prefer working with a sheet of text editor type stuff where you are kinda working in code. Now Dreamweaver kinda straddles a bit of both of them. It has a bit of the visual stuff, some of the wizywig things where you can drag and add things from a menu but it produces the code and you can see the code and interact with the code.

I'm a visual person, I like to work with Dreamweaver because it allows me the best of both worlds. It allows me to do quite easy stuff and get a website quite quickly up, but it also allows me to go in to the details and hack away and change things and edit them and that’s I guess for me that’s the perk of Dreamweaver.

Now you need to be clear when starting with Dreamweaver, it’s not really a design tool; it’s a production tool. Like building a house, someone else has drawn, the architecture’s drawn the house and you’re ready to go. Dreamweaver is where the builder turns up and starts making things. You can design as you go through Dreamweaver but it’s a clumsy way of doing it. Best way to do it is prototype. Most people prototype in something like Photoshop. I've got a full course on how to design a website in Photoshop. So you do all your work here in Photoshop. And once you get it signed off by the client, that’s when you open up Dreamweaver and start making things. Now Dreamweaver is great at some things and not great at other things. So if you’re using Dreamweaver and you're building a site and it’s no more than a 100 or so pages it’s perfect. But when you start getting into 1000s of pages, that’s when you’re gonna need something like a CMS rather than building your own site. CMS is slightly different as in it’s a premade site that you install on your host and you customize it to fit what you wanna do whereas what we’re doing here in Dreamweaver is we are building our own custom site from the ground up. I guess the big thing as a web designer, and what you wanna know, is that you gotta make clear to your client that when you a building it in Dreamweaver, that amends come through you. You’re the web designer, if they need changes made and updates done they come through you. Whereas if you install a cms or content management system, that’s fine, you don’t get as much control over what you can and can’t do in the website. But it allows the client often a back end, the can log in to, sign up and adjust some of the pages. The things that you allow them to adjust. So that’s the big difference between using Dreamweaver to get started or installing something like Wordpress or Droopal or Joomla to get started with the website.