Adobe Dreamweaver

Adobe Dreamweaver is a professional web design and development application. It is widely considered to be the best software of its type available. We use Dreamweaver to produce MediaCollege.com and we highly recommend it.

Dreamweaver offers a WSYIWYG editor and plenty of site management tools. It is also very good at working with HTML, CSS and scripting languages (client and server-side).

Newbies often find the interface intimidating at first but there is no need to learn all the functions immediately (or ever). For many people, basic site management and editing functions are all they need (although we strongly recommend learning HTML for anyone interested in web design).

One of the only things we find limiting about Dreamweaver is the FTP functionality. When it works, it works very well indeed and lets you synchronize files with minimal fuss. Unfortunately it often fails, experiences time-out errors and causes the program to respond slowly. For this reason we tend to use CuteFTP for uploading instead.

Tutorials:

• Dreamweaver Workspace
• Delete all .LCK files

History

Originally developed by Macromedia, Dreamweaver was acquired by Adobe in 2005. Here are the release dates for each version:

• Dreamweaver 1.0 (December 1997)
• Dreamweaver 1.2 (March 1998)
• Dreamweaver 2.0 (December 1998)
• Dreamweaver 3.0 (December 1999)
• Dreamweaver UltraDev 1.0 (June 2000)
• Dreamweaver 4.0 (December 2000)
• Dreamweaver UltraDev 4.0 (December 2000)
• Dreamweaver MX (May 2002)
• Dreamweaver MX 2004 (September 2003)
• Dreamweaver 8 (September 2005)
• Dreamweaver CS3 (April 2007)
• Dreamweaver CS4 (October 2008)