Many who know me, know that I do all my web designs with straight code. Many would call me a “coder” although I think that is a bit extreme. I started web designing back with Netscape Navigator had a WYSIWYG editor called Composer. You would drag and drop images into place and the program would write the HTML code. However, Composer was horrible! It always had a lot of ‘bloat’ that it would put into its pages. Bloat is extra script that is inserted to guarantee that your object remained in it’s place. This became a problem when you put it onto your server and looked at it in your browser… All that bloat took time to load!

When I realized what was happening, I decided that I had to learn how to do the code myself. I bought reference books galore to help me learn. I even used Composer to teach me the tags necessary to do what I wanted. I would do the WYSIWYG and then go into the code and rip out everything that was extraneous. What a pain!

A few years later, a colleague of mine turned me on to this product called, “AceHTML.” I used that editor for a very long time, but it has its limitations too. When you open it up, you are in a text editor. It has a tab that you can click on to see what you’ve done. Therefore, you don’t need to open your browser up so often to see your work. Well, for the most part…. You still have to open your document up into all the main browsers to confirm compatibility. I loved that AceHTML would help to check my code. It would alert me to missing tags. Other editors that I tried out, didn’t have this feature.

Over the years though, I felt like I was outgrowing AceHTML. I started writing Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript, PHP (limited amounts), and I wanted to begin learning AJAX. AceHTML wasn’t growing with me. I don’t think it has upgraded in 3 or 4 years. It doesn’t check your CSS, PHP, or JavaScript very well at all. In fact, forget about AJAX… that isn’t included either.

Over the last two years I started looking into Adobe’s Dreamweaver (Dw). I test drove it when it was CS2 and found I just didn’t like it! It was a memory hog and it was confusing. So I tossed it. Then when CS3 came out, I test drove it too.. Still not much fun for me. There was still a lot of confusing stuff there. I just didn’t have the time to go through a learning curve and still work. CS3 was very close to what I had hoped for in an editor it could check my code, all of it. However, the time on the test drive just wasn’t long enough for someone busy like me. It still seemed to be a memory hog too… So I tossed that too, falling back on my trusty AceHTML.

At this point, I was feeling very limited with my trusty tool, AceHTML. I just couldn’t stop considering Dreamweaver. I spoke with several people who used it. They had plenty to say about how it simplified their work. Wow! That would be so cool. Maybe it would be like cloning myself.. Hmm.. Anyway, I finally looked to some of my coder purist friends … the diehards. When they finally told me that the broke down and got it, I thought maybe I should reconsider.

Adobe has this irritating thing they do with their products. They put something into their programs that makes it impossible to re-test their products. The only way I found to get around it was to rebuild my machine. (I’m sure there are other ways, but this was very efficient.) This made it difficult to test drive their newest version, CS4 because I wasn’t due for a rebuild. So the only decision I could make was to buy it.

Adobe is one company that, although their products are pricey, they offer a money back guarantee, even if you test drive their products. So, I took them up on it and I bought Dreamweaver CS4.

The day came where Dreamweaver arrived. I installed it on my computer and began to play with it. It felt like Christmas! I spent all day playing with it. I watched their videos on all the new things that you can do with Dreamweaver. So far, I have not been disappointed. Of course, I refuse to look at how much memory it uses. I always leave me email program running, I use Quickbooks (for its timer), and then I use Photoshop at the same time too… Not to mention all those chat programs running in the background… Skype, ooVoo, Yahoo, MSN Messenger, AIM… All heavy hitters in memory. My system has crashed only once since installing Dreamweaver. My husband affectionately calls me his ‘High Bandwidth Broad’ because I run so much while I design pages and I use up all the bandwidth.

I am very impressed by the way Dreamweaver CS4 is working. I was able to keep my workload going even though I have not learned everything…not by a long shot. Although I work with the code, primarily, I have found myself sneaking into the WYSIWYG tool… sliding objects around and then checking to see if there is any bloat… no problem. Of course, if you want to look for things that are irritating, you’re going to find them… but so far, I am impressed! Great job Adobe!

One feature that is totally cool… “Live View!” This allows me to see a web page just like I am looking at it in a browser. All the CSS, JavaScripts, Ajax, work in Live View. They also put another function on there that is called “Live Code.” What this allows me to do is to run Live View and see the code as it changes. So if I see something in the view window that I don’t like, I can pause the view and find that specific code to change it. Pretty cool!

Well, I suppose it is time for me to get back to work.

More later!

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