MacroMedia DreamWeaver is one of the better webpage development tools available for the Macintosh or Windows platforms. While there are inevitable comparisons to Microsoft's FrontPage, dreamweaver is a superior tool and is aimed at the more serious developer. While a large site should really be programmatically generated, for medium and smaller sites, I would recommend dreamweaver. Although macromedia have designed dreamweaver to integrate with fireworks and other macromedia tools, I still prefer to use it with textpad, ImageReady and PhotoShop.
DreamWeaver is a veritable swiss army knife of tools for many varied web development tasks:
- If you are importing pre-existing pages, dreamweaver will keep the source formatting and will not rearrange your indentation or overwrite your custom tags.
- There is a full featured text editor with syntax highlighting, although I personally prefer to use textpad to edit my HTML.
- It is very JavaScript aware, with both drag and drop style feature addition, behaviours and an integrated debugger.
- The HTML reference from O'reilly's web books is included in the latest release of dreamweaver (version 4)
- It can check your pages for standards conformance, browser problems and accessibility issues.
- You can convert advanced layer based pages to tables and vice-versa.
- An Adobe Photoshop-style history palette which allows you to undo any accidental operations, even file saves.
- You can use the tag selector on the bottom of the dreamweaver window to quickly select an entire branch of tags, such as a row inside a table, or a DIV tag inside a paragraph.
- Fully CSS aware, and you can quickly apply a style to any tag you want.
- You can design templates which let people insert text into a page without disturbing the entire layout of the page.
- You can save frequently used images, movies etc in an asset list and reuse them quickly.
- It cleans up Microsoft Word mangled web pages!
- Fully supports WebDAV authoring.
- Can check for problems across an entire site, highlighting Title-less pages, missing alt tags and other common errors. It can also synchronise a remote site with a local copy and remove any orphaned files.
- DreamWeaver helps team working with page notes and other collaborative tools. The notes feature can also be used to add custom property fields to pages.
- You can quickly sketch out the layout of a site with the layout tool, allowing you to draw the site and create files and links automatically.
- When you've selected some text, you can easily edit the properties of the tag in a dialogue box.