What is your opinion on Macromedia Dreamweaver MX?

I got a couple of days ago and want to know what your opinion on it is. From what I have used of it so far, i think it is absolutely awesome, the WYSIWYG feature makes it so much easier to put together.

I am currently using it to put my first personal template together, so it is web friendly. So far it has worked great and between IE and FireFox it appears almost identical.

What do you think of it?

My personal opinion on any type of WYSIWYG editors are that they completely suck no matter how powerful or how many features they have. The reason is because there is never that complete, coding freedom when you're working with programs like Dreamweaver. Whereas when you're working with pure HTML code, it gives you all the power you want.

Yes, I've worked with Dreamweaver before. Back when it first came out, I was still using Frontpage for some basic web design. A couple of my friends told me creating frames with Dreamweaver is way much easier than Frontpage. So tried it and yes it IS way much easier. But guess what? Nobody knows what's behind all that. All anyone knows when they use Dreamweaver is that they make this horizontal/vertical line that runs through the page and you can add stuff on either side as if the frame itself is a separator. Well technically it is, but the whole concept of frames is joining 2 sites together, not splitting one site which is the point Dreamweaver is giving its users.

There are some, who might ignore the WYSIWYG part of Dreamweaver but use its coding feature. I still find it fairly annoying to half-way through get like an auto-fill. Dreamweaver also has a specific layout for its codes but i prefer to do it my way and i think my way is much neater.

Overall, Dreamweaver could still be considered one of the best Website builders you could find in the market but with raw HTML, you could do way much more and learn it in the process.

I still use Dreamweaver for it's syntax highlighting and in document error checking. It is a lot easier using Dreamweaver code view to create my work than using Wordpad all of the time. I suppose if you do want syntax highlighting, then there is always notepad++

Dreamweaver causes little error, and the errors in the code that do appear are mainly due to human error.

I agree with technocian though, it is better to learn the core scripting language (HTML http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp) and I would also add that you look into styles and formatting with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp) so that your pages become even more valid with HTML 4.1.

In my opinion, Dreamweaver is very, very good. And why I find it so good? Because it has helped me a lot. When I first started web designing I used Front Page. I had a book, too, but it was nothing special. Then after some time I switched to Dreamweaver. It was a blessing Even though it is completly different from FP I still got the hang of it. Now, DW is very good for newbies, but not only because it is a WYSIWYG editor, but also because it has a good of handling the code. I had no html knowledge before, but DW has changed that. While I was using it's graphic part I used to look at the source code and slowly started understanding quite a lot of things. The same way I learned the basics of CSS. You can make a CSS file in DW really easy.

Now I don't use the graphics part so much, but I still don't think that programming in notepad/wordpad is better. Why not use Dreamweaver's coding part and check once in a while how does it look. It is much more easy that way.

So, stick to Dreamweaver and explore the code a little bit, it will be helpful.

Dreamweaver is what i started using when i first got into web stuff, and i've grown accustomed to using it. Not like i do such heavy work, but for what i use it for it's fine. i like to use the code interface as much as possible, as it helps my practice and knowledge, and yes, i like the auto-fill feature. But i'm not at a level where i can simply work in code and visualise the page creation in my mind, so i have to frequently refer to the wysiwyg layout, to fix a sticky mistake i made, or just to quickly view changes. all in all, i would say if you're not a hard-core coder, nothing is better than dreamweaver, especially version 8.

I agree that it is awesome. I learned it during my first college course for web design. I am a graphic person, I'm terrible at coding. What I love is that once I learned it, I can now concentrate more on seeing how the code is made while I'm working. Switching back and forth from the wysiwyg to the coder or the split view is helping me learn the coding part better now. Everybody learns things differently, Dreamweaver is helping me learn what I would have had a much harder time using a text editor.

Dreamweaver, I feel, is the best at what it does. It is a very well put together program, intuitive, and lets someone with little to no web knowledge create a profesisonal looking site. It is what I first used after learning basic html to make my pages go from basic to awesome. As mentioned though there is an inherent flaw in its design, the WYSIWYG idea.

Frankly it is an awesome piece of software but all of the editors such as this limit you. Dreamweaver does a great job but it will never be able to give the same freedom as hard coding everything. That having been said it does a better job then any other of these types of editors that I have ever used.

If you are in the market for a visual website editor, grab a copy of Dreamweaver

I never really liked Dreamweaver and I never really used Frontpage. I started webdesign, with learning pure html and later css and was using a text editor with highlighting and that is what I prefer until now. I know people use photoshop to make their design and later they make the html out of it with some WYSIWYG editor.. but as I am used to create a layout in my head and make it by writing HTML with my hands I never really liked all of those WYSIWYG editors. It's lame for me to write hex codes and rows cells in an editor, I am not used I better do it myself, even though I know it is much faster, but I would need some time to get used to it. I have used software like Evrsoft First Page 2006, CoffeCup, but I did not like them too, unless for the scripts they can make, because I never got deep into javascript or the so called dhtml

But as I said, if I was using Dreamweaver, I think I could start liking it, many of my friends is using it and they are quite happy an I read a lot of good reviews about it. But some of my friends are using frontapge, I always comment to stop using it, the code it makes is really messy, I used to fix the html my friends created with frontpage and I really was angry how much better I could optimize it with my knowledge of html and hands. This is the main thing I hate about Editors that writes html on its own, it is not always w3c compatible too.

Exactly...like I've pointed out, some editors like Dreamweaver don't write the code YOUR style. Those who've been exposed to pure coding will realise this. That when writing code you always have tihs specific way of doing it, like putting comments before a tag or "tabbing" a certain sub-tag that comes after the main tag (Like tables and its rows and data). When i design a site on my own with pure HTML, when there's something wrong i usually know what exactly is wrong with it because I've done the code myself. But when someone hands me a super long script of HTML and tells me he did it in Dreamweaver and he couldn't get a certain image to display some way of sorts, I'll try to decipher the code but frankly, i can never read through all the extra junk Dreamweaver or Frontpage puts in that is really not required.

hi

the only critique of dreamweaver i have found that i can possibly make is a two pointed attack on what is a wonderful software to design with. Firstly it is true that to a programmer dreamweaver often produces a messy or inconcise code. however the ease that dreamweaver allows the designer to add css style sheets and applying them with 2 clicks of the mouse to the table tag is awsome. although it is unfortunate that the user has to apply the style sheet to each page that they are designing separately. also the positioning of graphics and type could be givern more freedom in the program by allowing the graphic interface [property inspector, for those familiar] to allow the positioning of graphics on the page by a pixal co-ordinate as is done in the writting of html script this would allow the designer far more freedom and speed to design the page without the creation of complex tables.

having said this dreamweaver is a wounderful development tool and its ability to organise and upload with ftp every time the webpage is save makes it a must for any webdesigner.