Work at Home Reviews

When choosing to design your own website there are many options and many paths you can take. The three popular platforms available for web design are FrontPage, Dreamweaver, and most recently XSitePro, which caters to internet marketers.

Each one of these website editing programs has their own features and standout attributes and it isn’t necessary to choose just one for your web design needs. Most experienced web developers know how to use all three but stick with one strictly on a preference or needs basis.

In this post I want to talk about the merits of Dreamweaver and in later posts I will cover the other website editing programs.

Dreamweaver was first created by Macromedia but was recently acquired by Adobe in 2005. This program can be used for both Mac and windows operating systems so this should not be a determining factor when deciding if Dreamweaver is right for you.

Benefits of Dreamweaver…

1. Dreamweaver is one of the only website editors that allow you to work on multiple sites at the same time. This is an essential feature for anyone serious about web design or even an online marketer since having a multi site business is always a plus.

2. Another great feature of Dreamweaver is the easy to use upload option through the built in FTP. You can also use shortcuts to quickly upload the pages that you’re working on.

3. Integrated CSS features. One of the best things about Dreamweaver is the way it simplifies coding and makes it easy for people who aren’t advanced coders. The point and click CSS window makes adding style sheets to your website much easier.

4. Dreamweaver also features the ability to create rollover buttons and comes with many stock options for you to choose if you cannot create your own.

5. Built in pop-up menus. You can easily create professional looking menu links without having to code it yourself.

6. Template Files. The benefits to using templates on your site are immense and allow for multi page fixes and edits. This feature can save you hours of time and increase your efficiency.

These are just some of the user friendly features available in Dreamweaver that will make your website design tasks easier to achieve.

A closer look at what these Dreamweaver benefits mean…

The ability to easily implement CSS on to your website is crucial; Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) separate website pages’ content from their design info. The practical application of this is that if you want to change the style of your website you don’t have to individually change all the pages – you just edit your CSS file.

Another very practical and important feature of Dreamweaver is the ability to clean up word documents at the click of a button. You can import word documents into a website editor but the problem is that the html code it transfers is messy. Dreamweaver has an option to fix the code from imported word documents.

One other awesome benefit is the ability to fix internal links after changing a WebPages name. Anytime you change an existing page’s name, you essentially ruin all the links on your site that are pointing to that page since the names are different. Dreamweaver automatically fixes these links upon a name change.

Overall Dreamweaver is a great tool to use for web development. If you are not familiar with it there are many training tools available, so you will never feel like you’re on your own trying to figure things out. Also, this review only touched on some broad aspects and features of Dreamweaver; the software itself has many more benefits to offer.