The pros and cons of Dreamweaver

As creating a front page for the website is our ancillary task we had to conduct research into appropriate software as a platform in which to create it. While browsing the internet on website building software we came across various software options for web design such as Web Studio 5.0 , Coffee cup , Adobe Dreamweaver and many more. We decided as a group we would  use Adobe Dreamweaver to create our website because firstly our school offers this currently within it's creative media package (latest version) so no additional charges would incur - and it's advantages over other the other creative software's we have looked at - such as it's wide use with professional web designers , it's wealth of resources available online & it's help and tutorial documents. We also decided to weigh up the pro's and con's of this software package to finalise our decision.

PROS

• Dreamweaver is a WYSIWYG editor (What you see is what you get)
• The user interface is easy to understand, and graphical. So functions are easily identifyable.
• Advanced tools.
• Drag and drop HTML creator, so complex HTML code doesn't need to be learned.
• Custom templates can be enabled to change multiple pages in one go.
• Being an Adobe package it works well in unison with other web packages i.e flash.
• Dreamweaver coding works perfectly with the latest web browsers.

CONS

• May look intimidating to new users.
• Lack of beginner tools.
• Coding can be messy/complicated if needed to edit other than the drag & drop feature.
• Entering double style attribute scripts can ruin the web page.

After looking at the pros and cons it is apparent that this software package has indeed a lot to offer in terms of creating a professional web page and it's use of templates to edit multiple pages as well as it's compatibility with all web browsers. However while using the package it is apparent that some HTML knowledge is necessary, the learning curve is steep and taking into consideration the time we must produce this & the main task we have decided not to use this software package to create our web page. Instead we shall seek to find an alternate web designing package which will allow us to produce a page to a professional standard but less time-consuming to learn.