Adobe Dreamwweaver CS3 Review

Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Review

I've been designing and developing web sites for quite some time now. I started out using Frontpage Express, which is a WYSIWYG editor, back in 1997. It was free and it provided me with a way to build web sites quickly and cheaply. Frontpage Express is a scaled down version of Frontpage and came as a free application that shipped with some new computers as preinstalled software. The problem with Frontpage Express is that it gives you little control of navigation development or basic organization of your web site. Unless you have knowledge of designing templates in html and using cascading style sheets you had to structure your navigation and site design manually. In effect this turned out to be a very inefficient labor intensive way to work and I ended up with many inconsistencies in style, navigation and link accuracy. And if I needed to make changes to the navigation I had to make those changes to each and every page the navigation was on. This was very time consuming.

There were other web site editors available at the time. Some were stand alone applications and others were web based and made available along with certain hosting services. Even Microsoft Word gives you the ability to utilize HTML and build web sites. But I needed something that would automate style, design consistency and navigation development. The one application, at that time, that could give me those abilities affordably and without an extensive learning curve was Frontpage 98. Frontpage 98 gave me all of the capabilities I needed. (Microsoft now offers a product called Web Expression. I have no experience with it.) What I was not pleased with was the fact that the template designs that shipped with the program were limited. Frontpage 98 just didn't have the design punch that I wanted and had seen on many web sites of the time. From what I read today in many forums comparing Frontpage with some of the better WYSIWYG HTML editors this issue still exists.

I began to examine the use of templates that could be purchased online and found quite a few good ones online specifically for Frontpage. But templates can be expensive. Especially the better designs. And if you find well designed templates, whether they're for Frontpage, Dreamweaver or any other web development program you are still limited with the design you buy. Manipulating a pre-designed template can sometimes cause problems with it.

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I needed a way to make my own custom templates. I knew if I could make my own I would be able to save money for my clients and have no restrictions on how I want to design a site. I tried Adobe GoLive and Dreamweaver but it was Dreamweaver that I finally settled with. the Adobe Creative CS3 Suite Web Premium that includes Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Creative Suite 3 Web Premium. Redefine the extraordinary in web design and development. Order Now!

I have to say that the learning curve for Dreamweaver and the entire suite was a bit steep, but the end result was much more than worth it. Visit our portfolio to see some of our work.

All but 6 of the sites on our portfolio page were designed with Dreamweaver MX and Dreamweaver MX 2004.

With Dreamweaver I can design templates and customize them to the specifications of my clients. And Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 has some excellent features for those of you who want to take on the development of dynamic webs and applications. Once you have learned how to use Dreamweaver to make your own templates it's very easy to use Dreamweaver's CSS capability to keep consistency of the look and feel of your web sites with HTML and dynamic file types. If you need to make a change to a template, including the navigation, it changes each and every page universally that that template was used to make. This is a huge time saver. And with CSS you have control over the use of HTML characteristics site wide.

Now just because I like developing my own templates doesn't mean you have to. There are thousands of Dreamweavver templates available on line. Just go to your favorite search engine and type in Dreamweaver templates and see what comes up.

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