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Dreamweaver 4 - Useful???

California

Charter Member
Site Supporter
I was cleaning out the last of a surplus electronics batch and discovered this. It seems to be the student/educator edition of Dreamweaver4 and Fireworks4. It must have been a hot product in its day, some starving student paid $160 for it. I seem to have a full set, manuals etc.

Is it worth the trouble to learn this?

I maintain a family website that's primitive, mainly intended as a family photo album for relatives to view and download from. I'm not trying to dazzle the public or market anything.

I realize there are later editions out but my question is whether what I have is worth putting some effort into to learn it.

Comments? Does anyone have an example of a website written using this?
 

Doc

Bottoms Up
Staff member
GOLD Site Supporter
How do you update your current site? If you do code it by hand via html I'd keep doing it that way. I've never used Dreamweaver, but I've heard it's better than Front Page. I tried Front Page and while it can make somethings easy, it inflated the code and made it harder to make manual edits to your website.
The best thing you could do is learn tables & css, then all you need is notepad or textpad ...or any editor to maintain your web sites.
I have a neat little web tutor I could share if anyone is interested. Another good resource is www.htmlgoodies.com
 

buy_25

Banned
California said:
I was cleaning out the last of a surplus electronics batch and discovered this. It seems to be the student/educator edition of Dreamweaver4 and Fireworks4. It must have been a hot product in its day, some starving student paid $160 for it. I seem to have a full set, manuals etc.

Is it worth the trouble to learn this?

I maintain a family website that's primitive, mainly intended as a family photo album for relatives to view and download from. I'm not trying to dazzle the public or market anything.

I realize there are later editions out but my question is whether what I have is worth putting some effort into to learn it.

Comments? Does anyone have an example of a website written using this?

I use dreamweaver with fireworks etc for about 2 years for my webpage. Easy and much better then frontpage. Frontpage is for people who know nothing but if makes WAY to much html code. ..
 

XeVfTEUtaAqJHTqq

Master of Distraction
Staff member
SUPER Site Supporter
Dreamweaver 4 is pretty old. It's still useful for what you want to do though.

I use DreamWeaver MX 2004, Visual Studio.NET 2003 & 2005 and a good text editor (UltraEdit). They all have their strengths and weaknesses.

I use DreamWeaver for design and layout and PHP. Each of these things is really just a tool to reduce the amount of hands on coding you have to do. If the tool creates code that is awkward or unmaintainable (i.e. Front Page - which I think has been discontinued) then it isn't a really useful tool.

PB
 

California

Charter Member
Site Supporter
Doc said:
How do you update your current site?
The best thing you could do is learn tables & css, then all you need is notepad or textpad
buy_25 said:
I use dreamweaver with fireworks etc for about 2 years for my webpage. Easy and much better then frontpage. Frontpage is for people who know nothing but if makes WAY to much html code.
I used Frontpage for the first draft then cleaned it up with some online proofer. Since then, notepad to update the main page. I've tried several programs to build photo index and photo pages with prev|index|next and in some cases, captions. For now I settled on Irfanview as the quickest for this.

I tried Dreamweaver's photo page builder and at first impression, don't like it. It resizes pictures to 100% but more compressed and according to the manual this wasted effort cannot be turned off. And it renames the pictures _jpg.jpg. I can't find the code to control appearance of the finished photo pages, and automating this (like Irfanview but better) is the main thing I want software to do.

I used Albumatic for a couple of large albums but it's too much trouble for anything short of a major presentation. Here's the best one
Link
(the family page that points to that explains what is there, in summary we went to visit Younger Daughter who was studying abroad).

I would appreciate advice on how to use Dreamweaver (or something else) to build albums like that one.

edit - just saw PB's post - Can anyone point me to some examples of a simple but effective use of
Dreamweaver?
 

XeVfTEUtaAqJHTqq

Master of Distraction
Staff member
SUPER Site Supporter
I'm not sure Dreamweaver is really the best tool for what you want to do. It is really more of a tool for people that want to get their hands dirty with the details but not with the basics (if that makes sense). It simplifies a lot of the simple stuff like creating table tags and setting styles, etc. But if you want to tweak something you are still going to have to get your hands dirty.

Something like Albumatic is a good starting point and I suspect you could load the HTML from Albumatic into Dreamweaver and jazz it up more.

If you want something really snazzy and completely customized then let me know but it isn't going to be cheap!

:bling:
 
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