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Dreamweaver nightmares

Late in 2006, I did a two-day course on Fireworks and Dreamweaver with Adult Education. It was enlightening, but probably not in the way the tutor had in mind (I think I was the student from hell).

As part of my degree in Internet Studies, I completed six web design subjects, and for the first two we weren't allowed to use anything except Notepad or a similar text processor – no WYSIWYG website design programs like Dreamweaver, FrontPage or GoLive. That was fine by me – my first lessons in HTML had used Notepad, and while managing a community website I hadn't bothered to learn or buy any new programs. Writing HTML with Notepad isn't difficult; it just requires practice, attention to detail and a few references.

But I was thinking about launching a business offering services that included analysing customers' websites and needed to know whether it was worthwhile buying Dreamweaver or something similar; I had tried learning it from a book but with limited success. By coincidence, I'd been asked to build a new page for an existing website (the whole site was for a franchised business; the new page was for one franchisee) and I couldn't understand why the existing site used so many tables, so many graphics and so much code. (A page on the main site was 17kB, plus 29 images totalling 60kB; the new page – which replaced graphic buttons with styled text – was only 5kB plus the 5 remaining images totalling 26kB.)

After two days at Adult Ed, I understood: on day one we assembled the site in Fireworks; on day two we transferred it into Dreamweaver.

There was almost no reference to the coding languages behind the site, yet almost every student could have gone home and published a superficially attractive website.

Dreamweaver is a fabulous, powerful tool for designing websites, but it won't make you a competent website designer any more than Photoshop will make you a graphic designer or Word will make you a writer. It allows you to develop websites without needing to learn about scripting languages, web standards, information architecture, usability or accessibility. Unfortunately, if you don't learn about those subjects, you're unlikely to build a site which adds as much value to your business as it could.

One solution: if you want to build and maintain your own site, go ahead. But get it edited by a web professional, and take their advice to heart.

Elizabeth Spiegel
October 2006

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