Building a website.... O.o

But when some thing goes wrong and Dreamweaver isn't doing what you want it to do, you'll have no idea how to fix it if you've only used the drag and drop / selector options.

You have SO much more control typing it all out yourself.

If I have a CSS change to make, I do it by hand, and it take's no time at all... a few seconds.
 
Ciphon said:
But when some thing goes wrong and Dreamweaver isn't doing what you want it to do, you'll have no idea how to fix it if you've only used the drag and drop / selector options.

You have SO much more control typing it all out yourself.

If I have a CSS change to make, I do it by hand, and it take's no time at all... a few seconds.
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Are your stylesheets like 10 lines long or something? Try hacking your way through a real one with notepad ...
 
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Cuchulain said:
Example?
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Well just hold everything together in an external style sheet, know what your objects are named.. then use CTRL + F to use the built in "Find" option, which instantly takes me to the tag I would like to amend.

Or, If I'm in a page and see a tag I would like to amend, I can highlight it with the mouse, press CTRL + F which fills out the text box with what is highlighted, and again, instantly find it!

Amend, CTRL + F5 (Save and Load)

Hand coding will ALWAYS beat drag and drop.
 
As Ciphon said, Dreamweaver is all well and good until it does something you don't want it to. Once it's done that you have to trawl through all its self made css and rubbish to try and find out why it's not working. Much simpler an easier to have written it all your self and know exactly what's going on at all times, whats inherited what and where everything is. More control really.

And Yeh I do my CSS sheets in such a way that I can easily navigate through them. Big titles and helpers etc, all in order / sections.
 
If you want a simple editor for coding things like HTML on mac I would recommend giving jEdit a go, its pretty simple and the nice thing about it is you can have 2 files open at the same time on the same window, so you could have your css stylesheet and your html page open side by side.

Good luck with your project
 
Ciphon said:
Well just hold everything together in an external style sheet, know what your objects are named.. then use CTRL + F to use the built in "Find" option, which instantly takes me to the tag I would like to amend.

Or, If I'm in a page and see a tag I would like to amend, I can highlight it with the mouse, press CTRL + F which fills out the text box with what is highlighted, and again, instantly find it!

Amend, CTRL + F5 (Save and Load)

Hand coding will ALWAYS beat drag and drop.
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I guarantee you that I could create absolutely anything you do by hand in Dreamweaver at least twice as quickly and my code will be semantic, properly formatted, accessible, cross browser compatible and will validate 100% every time.
 
Dreamweaver is a dream to work with, it has syntax highlighting, and you can see what you're doing. Best program for coding websites ever...
 
Don't use the WYSIWYG features of dreamweaver, just code it straight to get clean and logical mark up. Putting the things that should be lists in lists, and marking up the data correctly. If you disabled css, it should still look logical.

Since a load of web guys use mac, then the mac should probably have a decent toolkit. I hear coda is becoming the standard, but you have to pay, same with textmate.
 
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Cuchulain said:
I guarantee you that I could create absolutely anything you do by hand in Dreamweaver at least twice as quickly and my code will be semantic, properly formatted, accessible, cross browser compatible and will validate 100% every time.
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thats one hell of a guarantee.

90% of the people here recommend not using dreamweaver, you recommend it but you also are clearly rather cocky and make real out there assumptions so your recommendation doesn't really hold much weight.

only thing i can guess is that you are terrible at using programs like notepad so dreamweaver is twice as fast, but most other people can hack their way through "real" stylesheets easily.

a person working on a sites layout wouldn't need to open up the stylesheet as they are working on the sites layout. it's like saying dreamweaver isn't as good as you have to open the program which takes 3 seconds longer then something like notepad++ or jEdit :confused: . As has been suggested programs like jEdit allow for many different tabs to be viewable in one window, so you can have the html/js/php/css all viewable on 1 screen, easily findable and easy to edit. i have 5 stylesheets for a personal site i made to learn php, each has around 1700 lines, and i can still tell you exactly where each element is getting it's style from roughly exactly where it is. and you can double my speed to make a site just because dreamweaver is that much quicker?
 
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Mammalian said:
thats one hell of a guarantee.

90% of the people here recommend not using dreamweaver, you recommend it but you also are clearly rather cocky and make real out there assumptions so your recommendation doesn't really hold much weight.

only thing i can guess is that you are terrible at using programs like notepad so dreamweaver is twice as fast, but most other people can hack their way through "real" stylesheets easily.

a person working on a sites layout wouldn't need to open up the stylesheet as they are working on the sites layout. it's like saying dreamweaver isn't as good as you have to open the program which takes 3 seconds longer then something like notepad++ or jEdit :confused: . As has been suggested programs like jEdit allow for many different tabs to be viewable in one window, so you can have the html/js/php/css all viewable on 1 screen, easily findable and easy to edit. i have 5 stylesheets for a personal site i made to learn php, each has around 1700 lines, and i can still tell you exactly where each element is getting it's style from roughly exactly where it is. and you can double my speed to make a site just because dreamweaver is that much quicker?
Click to expand...

I'm cocky because I always used to use Textpad or similar to build site's, having spent 8+ years building commercial sites (at around a rate of 4 a month) in my current role I can guarantee it's far quicker and much more productive to use Dreamweaver (if you use Dreamweaver properly).

If people want to use a piece of crap to just drop elements in then they can use Kompozer or NVU, but I'm quite partial to the inbuilt validation, compatibility checks, O'Reilly reference library, excellent syntax highlighting and formatting, extensions, user creatable code-snippets and assets library (the list goes on) that DW offers.
 
Cuchulain said:
If people want to use a piece of crap to just drop elements in then they can use Kompozer or NVU, but I'm quite partial to the inbuilt validation, compatibility checks, O'Reilly reference library, excellent syntax highlighting and formatting, extensions, user creatable code-snippets and assets library (the list goes on) that DW offers.
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Are you on Adobe's marketing team?

For learning purposes, I suggest using note pad vs Dreamweaver or any other product like it as you will gain a much better understanding of how the code works. (Aimed at OP, not Cuchulain)
 
I don't think Cuchulain is advocating the WYSIWYG side of dreamweaver at all, merely the 'hand coding' editor side of it, which, he's quite correct is easier than doing it in notepad as you have (as he says) syntax-highlighting, auto-tab-formatting etc.

However for those features Dreamweaver seems a very hefty app, and probably Textpad/<insert other syntactical editor> would be just as good.
 
Martins said:
I don't think Cuchulain is advocating the WYSIWYG side of dreamweaver at all, merely the 'hand coding' editor side of it, which, he's quite correct is easier than doing it in notepad as you have (as he says) syntax-highlighting, auto-tab-formatting etc.

However for those features Dreamweaver seems a very hefty app, and probably Textpad/<insert other syntactical editor> would be just as good.
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If the debate is Dreamweaver's hand coding side v Notepad then I'd like to enter exhibit A - Notepad++. ;)
 
i use DW but dont use the wysiwyg editor. DW saves a shed load of time in developing for me.

i love the put option it uses to put files live also.
 
I guess it really depends on whether this will be a one-off for you or you're going to advance further on in the future. I think DreamWeaver is OK if you're just going to make some basic pages with a few links and some JavaScript/FLASH but if you decided to advance further and start learning PHP, ASP.net, SQL or other Server-side scripting then learning how the code works from a textual perspective would help greatly.
 
Well I have been doing fairly basic stuff in html, css and javascript on and off for about a year and a half and always use notepad.

tried for a time with MS Front Page (avoid)

also very handy are Notepad++ and EditPad lite...nice alternatives and Notepad++ you can highlight each section of the code to make sure you are working on the right section of the page.

A mate of mine told me from the start to hand code as much as possible:
1. Good practice
2. Any mistakes are yours and not the software

Will start to use DW next year though :)
 
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