What is Dreamweaver

Hi, my name is Dan,  and in this video we're gonna look at  where does Dreamweaver sit in the grand  scheme of web design. Okay, so there's, there's three main positions. There's, uh, the side, which is things like Muse or Webley,  and they are totally wy. Whig, uh, open the program, drag and drop  and hit export website. Very visual, okay, but not a lot of customization. If it's not built into the product, you can't do it.

Okay? Muse is amazing and I love it,  and I've built lots of sites in it,  but it has, it gets to a, you get  to your limit quite quickly, so no customization. Um, wherever here you've got full customization, okay? Full code, okay? Where it's for people who like to see in code, okay? Uh, 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 kind of like text editor type stuff  where you are kind of working, yeah, working in code. Now, during, with the kind of straddles bit of both of them,  it has a bit of the visual stuff, okay? Some of the WY wig things where you can drag  and add things from a menu, um, but it produces the code  and you get to see the code and interact with the code. And that's where I sit. I'm a visual person. I like, I like to work with Dream Me,  because yeah, it allows me both best  of both worlds allows me to, um, do quite easy stuff  and get a website quite quickly up.

But it also allows me to go into the details and hack away  and change things and edit them. And that's, I guess for me, the perk of Dreamweaver. Now, you need to be clear when you're starting  with Dreamweaver, it's really not a design tool, okay? It's a production tool. So like building a house, uh, it is somebody else's drawn,  the architect'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 the,  it's a clumsy way of doing it.

Uh, best way to do it is prototype. Um, most people will prototype in something like, uh,  something like Photoshop, okay? I've got a full course on how  to design a website in Photoshop. So you do all your work here in Photoshop and,  and once you get it signed off with a client, okay,  that's when you open up Dreamweaver  and get ready to start making things. Now, Dreamweaver is great at some things  and not great at other things. So if you are using Dreamweaver and you're building a site  and it's no more than a hundred  or so pages, it's perfect, okay?

But when you start getting into thousands of pages,  that's when you're gonna need something like a CMS rather  than building your own site, okay? CMS is slightly different, as in it's a pre-made 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're  building our own custom site from the ground up. I guess the big thing is a web designer,  and what you wanna know is that you gotta make clear  to your, uh, client  that when you are building a site in Dreamweaver  that a means come through you. You're all the web designer. If they need changes made  and updates done, they're gonna come through you.

Whereas say if you install a CMS  or a content management system,  that's fine. Um, 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 backend that they can log  to, sign up and adjust some of the pages, okay? The things that you allow them to adjust. Okay? So that's the big difference between using Dreamweaver  to get started or installing something like WordPress  or Drupal or Jumela, okay? To get started with the website.