Dreamweaver is a decent program, but it is fundamentally a design program and not a content program. If an organization has someone who is experienced using it and you aren't trying to maintain more than a dozen pages, it probably would make sense to use it. However, it is not setup for people who just need to modify the content to their website as it is a complicated application that takes sustained time and effort to use correctly. Most organizations would benefit from separating content and design, as they are different skill sets.
It is easy for sites maintained by Dreamweaver to fall into disrepair. Bad links, inconsistent formatting, and messy url's are common. Static websites are more difficult to keep in the long term as it is easy for inconsistencies to arise as changes generally need to be made page by page.
As a modern Content Management System, Drupal offers:
- Distributed content so that your supporters can access your news how they want to
- News Aggregators allow you to pull in selected content and publish it on your site
- More accessible and standards compliant designs - which are much better for search engines
- A clear focus on content, which is what matters
- Content can be edited/maintained from anywhere that has an internet connection and a browser.
- Easy ways to change site design across the whole site.
- Changes to individual pages can be tracked and content can be restored to a previous version
- Built in search engine and sitemap tools allow your users to easily access your data
- Search engines like Google can also access your site more effectively thorugh a CMS and tools like xml sitemaps
- Drupal allows for a dynamic experience where end users can interact with the site (forum, comment and event modules for instance).
A Content Management System isn't the ideal solution for all websites, but it certainly makes it easier for you to control your own content and ensure that it is displayed professionally.
OpenConcept prefers to train clients to be able to control their content directly, but we are happy to support people with either static html or dynamic sites. Please contact us if you need help with your site.
I really like Coda (a Mac
I really like Coda (a Mac only app), since it can edit HTML, CSS, and PHP code. Unlike Dreamweaver, it doesn't shield you from the actual code. I've always preferred hand-written HTML to the ugly mess produced by Dreamweaver and most other similar applications.
This raises some interesting
This raises some interesting thoughts about Dreamweaver's future in a Web 2.0 world.
As a WYSIWYG editor, Dreamweaver has a large following in the design community, but as you point out it is not really an appropriate end user application. However, Macromedia has a linked product, Macromedia Contribute, that is intended to allow users to update content within the template framework established in Dreamweaver. When using Contribute, Dreamweaver acts as the 'master' application, and Contribute acts as the 'slave' giving site editors or authors the ability to change content within a very granular structure controlled by Dreamweaver.
This Dreamweaver/Contribute combination works well for smaller sites that need content update capability, but that are not structured enough to really take advantage of a CMS framework. Smaller, design-intensive brochureware sites can benefit from this approach as an alternative to Drupal or Joomla -- if there is a skilled Dreamweaver user available to act as the 'master', and if the site is not going to be taking advantage of all the Web 2.0 forums, polls, and other interactive web apps that come standard with an Open Source CMS.
Since the sites suitable for Dreamweaver and Contribute are a dwindling percentage of the content on the web, Macromedia has a dilemma -- how to reposition Dreamweaver in a web 2.0 world?
Microsoft has recently rebranded FrontPage, their little-loved competitor to Dreamweaver, as 'SharePoint Designer', and repositioned it as the designer's tool for creating templates and design themes for their SharePoint groupware/CMS, giving it a way to move forward into their proprietary Web 2.0 world.
In my view, Macromedia should do a similar transformation with Dreamweaver, by creating extensions that will allow Dreamweaver to be the tool of choice for template design in the Open Source CMS world. Third-party Dreamweaver extension developers have already created extensions that allow Dreamweaver to be used to build Joomla templates in a WYSIWYG environment, and Bryght has documented techniques for using Dreamweaver to build Drupal Themes... but for Dreamweaver to remain relevant in an open source world, Macromedia needs to dive in and give Dreamweaver the built-in capability of acting seamlessly as a WYSIWYG tool for contructing PHPTemplate and Smarty Themes for Drupal, Templates for Joomla -- and the same for Typo3 and the rest of the top frameworks in the Open Source CMS universe.
It's not too late to save Dreamweaver as a fine proprietary product... if Macromedia has the vision to place it squarely in the Open Source workflow!
Drupal theme Dreamweaver
NOTE: OpenConcept has not used or tested this software so use at your own disgression.
Now it is very easy to create theme in dupal using our dreamweaver extension Drupal theme Dreamweaver