4 Tips to Help You Choose Between Dreamweaver and Hand Coded Markup
When you decide to build a website, you must consider the time, budget, and skill investment to factor into the equation. There are many applications and tools available for web development and we want to help you make the best choice. Many designers and developers consider that most of the software tools available are limited in terms of customization and maintenance.
There appears to be an ongoing debate among designers and developers as to whether authoring programs like Dreamweaver are any better than hand coded HTML and CSS for converting designs and building an effective website.
Web development applications like Dreamweaver do offer some powerful features for quickly building, editing, and refining of HTML code. Also, Dreamweaver is customizable and has hundreds of extensions that can be used with it. In spite of being a powerful web development tool, we think a professional web developer will always choose to hand code – and here are a few arguments that support our viewpoint:
- Dreamweaver does not offer cross browser compatibility. If you want to make sure that your website will look great on any browser or Internet access device, we advise you to choose a provider of W3C compliant hand coded markup.
- Although it usually generates efficient HTML code, Dreamweaver may also include code cluttered with inadequate tags resulting in code that will need to be reworked.
- Dreamweaver has a rather steep learning curve and it will take time to master. You need to ask yourself if you are being more efficient with your time trying to learn it, or to start productively hand coding your web pages or hiring a professional PSD to HTML provider.
- Dreamweaver is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) web design tool that provides visual methods for coding pages where – you will not be exercising much of your coding skills, and you will probably have a hard time maintaining the code.
Hand coding gives you the freedom to develop your web pages with optimum flexibility, ensuring important features such as cross browser compatibility and long term maintenance. At CodeMyIMAGE, we are focused on providing hand coded markup because we understand the nuances and specifications of every design and website.
Tags: coded design, dreamweaver, manual markup, psd to html
4 Tips to Help You Choose Between Dreamweaver and Hand Coded Markup | Blog CodeMyImage…
When you decide to build a website,you must consider the time,budget,and skill investment required.We want to help you choose the best web development solution….
What efficient HTML code your Dreamweaver is generating? I haven’t faced this issue. Which version of Dreamweaver you are using?
Hi. We only use manual markup.
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As a matter of fact, contemporary versions of Dreamweaver are not automated at all – and are exactly what forced me to learn to write proper markup by hand, starting with version CS3, four years ago.
It is true that Dreamweaver has a few conveniences left over from the wysiwyg days that any designer can appreciate. Point-and-shoot file linking, built-in site management and baked-in ftp are three off the top of my head.
But the fact is that it’s perfectly possible, and preferable, to write your own xhtml and css – and even php, javascript and a few other things, if you like, right in the code view window, and get an approximation of what that code is going to look like in a webkit browser, in the design view window, without having to push every update to the server.
That’s a nice timesaver if you don’t have a fast connection. In the US, half a mb/sec upload is common even in cities – not fast. And when you’re looking for one CSS selector to change (or a hundred) it’s nice to be able to select an element in the design view and be able to have DW highlight the CSS that needs to change, all with a key command.
Besides – if you’re already buying a suite with Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign (yes, there is still this thing called print, and not only do clients still like it – it’s cheaper than ever to produce) DW comes basically free in the box. Why spend another $100US on Coda?
Anyone can write bad code. I’m sure we’ve all seen our share. But anyone can also write good code in any tool. It’s about the writer, not the tool.
And in the same way that a smoker who’s just quit that habit starts preaching about lung cancer, I’m a designer who didn’t learn markup until I was 47. So now I’m an obsessed preacher about code: if I could learn at 47, and get decent by 50 (I’m 51 now) then anyone can, and they should.