Dreamweaver?

[hoonah*]

Do you web designers rec. this program for total beginners?

I am sure that my Uncle has it, and would let me install it, but I wondered if it is very user friendly to complete beginners.

Thanks!

[british bloke]

In my opinion, yes - it is a nice package - some tuitionhelps but a lot of help is available on the web if you get stuck.

[middletree]

For total beginners, not really. Unless you are willing to read a book to go along with it. DW is not the same as FrontPage or the other programs designed for newbies. One should have a handle on HTML (very solid) and CSS and Javascript(decent) to use DW.

I frequent the DW newsgroup as much as I do here, and I see what happens when the inexperienced person uses DW. It isn't pretty.

[mat1583]

I agree with middletree. It's not necessarily the beginner's tool. I hardly ever use the "design" part of the application, but I'm used to hand-coding anyway. The problem with WYSIWYGs is that although most of the time you get what you see, you don't always get what you want. For simple pages it's fine, but it can lead to frustration if you're doing some scripting or working with CSS.


-washboard

[kiwimobro]

I agree with these guys ^ DW is a good tool, but you'd need to be pretty serious to bother with it and certainly study some of the behind the scenes coding. I use it, but never purely as a WYSIWYG app. and I always have an html reference book close at hand.

[mercyGurl]

I'm currently working on the new design for thirddayfans.net in DW, and I was wondering if y'all could give me an example of some badly designed sites that were made using DW. I'm not a beginner in terms of I know HTML pretty well and have a good grasp of CSS and enough to go by in JS.

Anyway....I was wondering what to avoid in thirddayfans.net...;)

[Aaron]

I used DW for when I first got into websites and it majorly screwed everything up. It's not user friendly at all to people who have never done HTML before and it doesn't teach you very much as it messes up the code easily. I would get a beginner web design book from the library or go to www.htmlgoodies.com and learn from there.

[middletree]

I used DW for when I first got into websites and it majorly screwed everything up. It's not user friendly at all to people who have never done HTML before and it doesn't teach you very much as it messes up the code easily. I would get a beginner web design book from the library or go to www.htmlgoodies.com and learn from there.
I disagree that it screwed things up or that is messes up the code. It just does what the user tells it to. It is a great tool, and most professional web developers find it useful. It's just not good for newbies.

I agree that html goodies is a good site to learn from.