I’ve received a number of very kind emails regarding my last digital design column, but I have to admit that a couple made me feel slightly uncomfortable.
These were the emails from designers thanking me for pointing them in the direction of Dreamweaver when they were making the transition from print to web design. It was a decision that they had come to appreciate greatly over the years, providing them with the best possible platform for their web design careers.
The problem is that Dreamweaver is dying…
To be fair it’s not Dreamweaver’s fault. Nor is the problem Adobe and its development team - the last Dreamweaver CS4 version was the most impressive release in years. Moreover, although Microsoft Expression Web poses a far more credible threat than FrontPage could muster, Dreamweaver remains the best HTML/CSS page-based editor available.
The real problem for Dreamweaver and for its users is that the nature of the web is changing dramatically. Dynamically-generated web applications, from Amazon right down to the humble blog, all offer much more – in-built commenting, voting, RSS feeds, etc - than the best sites built on static HTML can ever hope to provide.
This isn’t a matter of bells and whistles, it’s absolutely fundamental. Ultimately a web site is all about content - posting it and making it findable – and Dreamweaver and the other static HTML editors have proven fundamentally flawed when it comes to these two core tasks (and features such as Dreamweaver’s libraries and templates are patches not solutions).
The bottom line is that the old model of the central webmaster hand-spinning every page of every website and, worse, manually adding the navigation necessary to help users find it, just isn’t scalable or viable. The only feasible course for the future is for content to be posted by the content contributor, whether that’s the site owner or site visitors, and for the best possible navigation to be constructed around that content on the fly.
In other words Web 2.0 isn’t an empty slogan, it marks a fundamental break with the past and Dreamweaver lies on the wrong side of it. So is this the end for Dreamweaver and the traditional Dreamweaver-based web designer?
Eventually yes. In the relatively near future every website will be a dynamically-generated web application and all of today’s sites built on multiple static pages will be ripped out and replaced.
The good news of course is that this is actually a huge opportunity – think Klondike gold-rush - for the web designer who can adapt. But how? After all your average designer is built along radically different lines to your average developer.
But it can be done. Just as Dreamweaver eased the transition for print-only designers to the new markup-based world of HTML; content management systems such as Joomla and Drupal can ease the transition for static Web 1.0 designers to the new Web 2.0 world of script-based PHP. Give them a chance and you’ll be amazed at what you can achieve and all without touching a line of code (that can come later just as it did with Dreamweaver).
I really can’t recommend this strongly enough. If you are a Dreamweaver user don’t bother upgrading to the latest version or exploring Adobe’s feeble attempts to graft end user content contribution onto Dreamweaver. Instead save your money and invest your time in getting to grips with the real future of web design: server-based content management systems.
Dreamweaver is dying. Long live Drupal.
...All in all Dreamweaver will be around for a while yet. However it used to be the dominant web force and the secret behind the overwhelming majority of professional web sites and it won’t be in the future.
The future for creating web design is in the browser not in Dreamweaver.
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