Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 review

[JEM_staff]

Dreamweaver is the world's best-known and most technologically advanced WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) Web design and development tool. Unfortunately for Adobe, the Web development market has exploded in two different directions, neither of which require a tool like Dreamweaver. On the low end, people use blogging software and content management systems; and on the high end, Web developers are working with complex logic in non-traditional Web languages to create dynamic sites. Though Dreamweaver can be made to work with either approach on a limited basis, there are other, cheaper, more task-appropriate tools on the market, leaving Dreamweaver as a relic of the static site era. With a market challenge of this proportion, Dreamweaver CS3 had to be an impressive new release with innovative, must-have features. For the most part, it has not met that requirement.

Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 review

[Bay Stevens]

Jem,
I was just getting ready to purchase this software, buy the book and sign up for the course. Having purchased a non-OEM Adobe Suite and getting hit by the company for bad behavior, I am wary of alternative products. Could you explain "It's easier to download the product activation crack tool from a P2P network or warez site, and if you do that, you may as well download the whole program for free anyway. Limited-use product activation is absurd."
I use an old but serviceable program called Front Page which does most of the code work for me.

[Valour]

Originally Posted by Bay Stevens

Jem,
I was just getting ready to purchase this software, buy the book and sign up for the course. Having purchased a non-OEM Adobe Suite and getting hit by the company for bad behavior, I am wary of alternative products. Could you explain "It's easier to download the product activation crack tool from a P2P network or warez site, and if you do that, you may as well download the whole program for free anyway. Limited-use product activation is absurd."
I use an old but serviceable program called Front Page which does most of the code work for me.

Just use a filesharing program like LimeWire or FrostWire, or go to www.thepiratebay.org and search for adobe cs3. You'll find lots of things, but what you're looking for is an activation crack tool. It'll remove the activation scheme from the software, which will allow you to run it without having to tell Adobe.

[LarryC]

I have been asked to take over the administration and updating of a web site that was originally developed in DreamWeaver but was later converted to FrontPage.

The site needs to be downloaded into DreamWeaver and I'm asking if anyone can point me in the right direction.

I have just purchased (and downloaded the trial version of) DW having used GoLive for many years.

I find several articles on converting GL to DW but need to be "pushed" to the right place for FP to DW.

[Valour]

Originally Posted by LarryC

I have been asked to take over the administration and updating of a web site that was originally developed in DreamWeaver but was later converted to FrontPage.

The site needs to be downloaded into DreamWeaver and I'm asking if anyone can point me in the right direction.

I have just purchased (and downloaded the trial version of) DW having used GoLive for many years.

I find several articles on converting GL to DW but need to be "pushed" to the right place for FP to DW.

Do you mean that your site is using a template, and need to convert the template? If it's just a bunch of static pages created separately, there is no conversion necessary -- just open the HTML files with Dreamweaver and work on them directly.

If the old site was using a template in Frontpage (I know Dreamweaver can do templates, but I'm not sure about Frontpage or GoLive, so I'm just guessing here), then I'm not sure how you'd convert it to Dreamweaver...

[Carmela]

[quote=Valour;23642].................If it's just a bunch of static pages created separately, there is no conversion necessary .................
QUOTE]


Aren't there "extensions" or "tags" in Front Page that need to be removed?
Should I create a new page in DW and then paste in the whole FP page?

[Valour]

[quote=Carmela;24315]

Originally Posted by Valour

.................If it's just a bunch of static pages created separately, there is no conversion necessary .................
QUOTE]


Aren't there "extensions" or "tags" in Front Page that need to be removed?
Should I create a new page in DW and then paste in the whole FP page?

FrontPage is notorious for producing messy HTML code. What you're thinking of here is probably the removal of superfluous HTML tags and other garbage. This is not absolutely necessary, but larger HTML files mean slower loading times and generally poorer search engine optimization.

If you have the time to rework the project, I would create a template in Dreamweaver, then copy in your old content to each page created with the template. So if you need to make any site-wide changes in the future, like a new menu item or a new footer link, you can do it by changing the template instead of hand-editing every single page.

If you just need to get going with the site right now, there's no reason why you can't use Dreamweaver open up the HTML files you created in FrontPage. There could potentially be problems in doing major changes to the HTML with Dreamweaver because of the way FrontPage produces HTML code, but I don't expect they'd be too difficult to solve.