HOUSTON BUSINESS REVIEW

COST-EFFECTIVE IT: DREAMWEAVER PRODUCT REVIEW
By Richard Sonnier

Houston Business Show Commentator Richard Sonnier, of the Information Technology Services firm Nimble Services, provides weekly information on our show about information technology issues. Mr. Sonnier can be reached at 281.445.4800 x 250 or via email.

Summary

Overall, Dreamweaver is a fine product and widely used by webmasters to create and maintain websites. As a more complex product, it requires more investment of time and money to use effectively. As a market leader among WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) HTML editors, there are a large number of extensions and templates available for Dreamweaver. Some of these are free but most are available for a small fee.

The Sam Houston Area Council of the Boy Scouts uses Dreamweaver to maintain its website and it reports that the product is very effective. The users are not website design professionals, yet Dreamweaver allows them to maintain a modern, very nice site at a lower cost than using a website design professional for every change.

What is Dreamweaver?

Dreamweaver is a visual editing tool to create and maintain web pages. It supports dynamic web pages commonly DHTML so it can embed JavaScript or Flash into the HTML to provide dynamic web pages. Items like Flash buttons or Flash text provide a very nice look to a website. It is often compared with the free product Nvu, as in "Nvu is the Linux Dreamweaver." Nvu is based on the Mozilla project and underwritten by the Linux vendor Linspire, Inc. It is currently at release 0.7. Many people already regard it as better than Fontpage for its support of standards and generation of clean HTML code.

Dreamweaver is Not

• A web application generation
• A tool for creating server side code
• A tool for designing web databases
• A web publishing system or Content Management System allowing many different people to publish pages on the websites
• A web graphics creation tool
• A web multimedia creation tool
• A web presentation server

Macromedia has other products like Flash MX, Fireworks MX, ColdFusion MX, and Contribute 3 to address all these areas. Dreamweaver is just for creating the web pages. To get a full suite of web development tools, you can purchase the Studio MX 2004 suite which includes:

• Dreamweaver MX 2004 for creating the web pages
• Flash MX 2004 for creating multimedia content to add to the web pages
• Fireworks MX 2004 for creating and optimizes graphics for the web pages
• FreeHand MX 2004 for creating vector graphics for the web pages
• ColdFusion MX 6.1 Developer to use the advance server features of ColdFusion

If you are interested in two of these products then you can buy the suite and get them all for the same or less money. For example, Dreamweaver and Flash retail for $898 while Studio MX is $899. ColdFusion MX Developer is a bit of a trap since to publish a website using ColdFusion requires you to buy the ColdFusion server at $1299.

Web Applications

We have used Flash MX to develop web applications and it makes very nice front-ends. However, the Macromedia products are graphics- and layout-oriented and for traditional IT applications these advanced features actually get in the way and make parts of the application development process harder than it needs to be. Overall, we believe that other tools are more effective for web applications like CodeCharge Studio 2.3 or hand coding.

CodeCharge uses a standard IT application development process where you:

1. Design your database;
2. Define your processing on that database; and
3. Create the web forms to interact with user and perform the processing.

The disadvantage of CodeCharge is that it is not going to generate rich, fancy or graphical web pages, but it does support generating all the server code in Perl, ASP, JSP, ColdFusion and PHP. It can use a template style to create the basic web pages so if you want a fancier look and feel, you can edit them in tools like FrontPage or Dreamweaver.

Web Professionals

It is interesting to note that professional website designers recommend learning HTML and hand coding web pages to get the best results. It seemed that Dreamweaver is an intermediate tool. It is very good for the situation where someone with good computer skills is maintaining a graphical, commercial website part-time. If someone is doing website development all the time, then he can invest the time to learn HTML and JavaScript directly and achieve the best results.

Simple Website, Beginner: FrontPage, Nvu
Simple Website, Intermediate: Dreamweaver
Simple Website, Professional: Hand coding

Complex Graphics Website, Beginner: FrontPage, NVU, Gimp, Shareware
Complex Graphics Website, Intermediate: Macromedia (Dreamweaver, Fireworks) or Adobe (Photoshop, etc.)
Complex Graphics Website, Professional: Macromedia or Adobe for Content, Hand coding

Dynamic Multimedia Website, Beginner: Too Hard for Beginner
Dynamic Multimedia Website, Intermediate: Macromedia (Flash, Dreamweaver) or Adobe or Swish
Dynamic Multimedia Website, Professional: Macromedia or Adobe for Content, Hand Coding

Dreamweaver MX 2004 Versus FrontPage 2003

Dreamweaver Pros

• More complex, advanced product
• Best with other Macromedia products; built-in creation of Flash buttons and text
• Pages look "almost perfect" in all the major browsers
• Supports a wide array of servers: ColdFusion, ASP, ASP.NET, PHP
• You can create a template and apply it to hundreds of pages with a single click

FrontPage Pros

• Lots of templates so easy for beginner to use
• Best with other Microsoft products
• Pages look best with Internet Explorer
• Good with ASP pages

Dreamweaver Cons

• Cost $350-$400
• Advanced functions require extra cost extensions or other Macromedia products
• Steeper learning curve; helps if you understand HTML
• Can lead you to Studio MX 2004 at $899
• Can lead you to use ColdFusion MX Standard server at $1299

FrontPage Cons

• Use FrontPage extensions and produces non-standard code
• Works best with the new IIS ASP.NET framework
• Advanced features require loading ASP.NET framework on the client

Next week I will discuss the heart of interactive websites: web forms.