Web Development Tool: Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver has truly been weaving dreams throughout the Internet for years. Created by Macromedia and now owned by Adobe, Dreamweaver is among the best web building programs for beginners wanting to learn web design.

Dreamweaver writes the codes for you. It is a web-authoring tool that creates very professional and attractive websites in minutes, once you know how to use it. The good thing is, it’s user friendly. It comes available for both Mac and Window and recent versions of Dreamweaver allow for new web improvements to the program that allow CSS, JavaScript, frameworks, ColdFusion, ASP.NET, JavaServer Pages and PHP. All these technical terms help to work behind the scene to help web designers create awesome websites.

As a web development tool, Dreamweaver is practical, intuitive and a favorite among beginner web designers. Like all programs, however, it has some quirks that may work against your final product. Some criticize that Dreamweaver produces extra HTML code and pages with file sizes that are bigger and more complex, causing slow load time and may perform poorly in some browsers. This is especially true when created table-based layouts.

Dreamweaver comes with very good tools, including a site management tool. You can also preview websites in many browsers prior to publishing the site. Dreamweaver’s web development tools allow you to enable JavaScript without any prior knowledge of this language.

Many people who enjoy building websites with Dreamweaver have the advantage of using “Extensions,” – these are small programs which web developers write using HTML and JavaScript that allow for neat special effects and features to those navigating your site. An example of this is the rollover effect when putting your mouse over links and buttons. Dreamweaver can be loaded and edited to your remote server using FTP, SFTP and WebDAV.

Dreamweaver tutorials are available for free download. Buying a good book on Dreamweaver can’t hurt and downloading the program for a 30 day trial period can always give the web designer the opportunity to see if its what he or she is looking for.