I've been involved professionally with the design and development of corporate internet presences since 1996, when we used little more than Notepad and an understanding of html to craft our creations. Websites have moved on an awful lot since then, with the majority of websites now having to fulfil certain needs and achieve predetermined goals and its a fact that almost every website now developed has some form of dynamic content incorporated within it.

The tools we utilise to develop websites are also constantly evolving and although Notepad is still there and used it is now mostly to remove the formatting of text from Microsoft Word documents when cutting and pasting as opposed to using it as a development tool.

The tool of choice now for many website development professionals is Macromedia Dreamweaver in one form or another with the latest release being Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004.

Macromedia Dreamweaver MX2004 is aimed at the professional website developer, both hard core coders/application developers and also those of us that are more creative professionals. It's a seriously big application that contains a host of tools for website design and maintenance.

Upon opening Dreamweaver MX2004 you are now presented with the following start page:

 

The Start page enables you to open a recent document, create a new document or create a new document based upon a supplied sample; you can also learn more about Macromedia Dreamweaver by taking a product tour or a tutorial.

Delving a little deeper into Dreamweaver gives us a whole new yet strangely familiar layout with the main windows and panels being set-up as follows:

 

The Insert bar contains buttons for inserting various types of "objects," such as images, tables, and layers, into a document. Each object is a piece of HTML code that allows you to set various attributes as you insert it. For example, you can insert a table by clicking the Table button in the Insert bar. If you prefer, you can insert objects using the Insert menu instead of the Insert bar.

The Document toolbar contains buttons and pop-up menus that provide different views of the Document window (such as Design view and Code view), various viewing options, and some common operations such as previewing in a browser.

The Document window displays the current document as you create and edit it.

The Property inspector lets you view and change a variety of properties for the selected object or text. Each kind of object has different properties.

Panel groups are sets of related panels grouped together under one heading. To expand a panel group, click the expander arrow at the left of the group's name; to undock a panel group, drag the gripper at the left edge of the group's title bar.

The Files panel enables you to manage your files and folders, whether they are part of a Dreamweaver site or on a remote server. The Files panel also enables you to access all the files on your local disk, much like Windows Explorer (Windows) or the Finder (Macintosh).

Dreamweaver also provides a variety of other panels, inspectors, and windows not shown here, such as the CSS Styles panel and the Tag inspector.

For anyone that has not used Macromedia Dreamweaver before the program comes with one of the best help systems I have ever encountered while reviewing software or utilising it for that matter, the help system includes tutorials, samples, quick step guides, etc. and it helps everyone both new comers to Dreamweaver and old hands like myself.

Dreamweaver allows you a choice of three different work spaces, a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, for the coders we have a code view and a combination of the two a split screen, which I've never found especially useful as I personally like to work switching between WYSIWYG mode and full code editing mode.

The number of features being packed into Macromedia Dreamweaver just keeps getting better and better: ASP, CFM, CSS, JSP, PHP, SQL and XML reads like a who's who of technical mumbo jumbo that only a few will understand. (ASP= Active Server Page(s), CFM=Cold Fusion Mark-Up, CSS=Cascading Style Sheet, JSP=Java Server Pages, PHP=PHP Hypertext Pre-processor (server-side scripting language) orPersonal Home Page (original name for PHP server-side scripting language), SQL= Structured Query Language (database query language), and XML=extensible Mark-up Language.

And although support for PHP/MYSQL is perhaps a little on the light side, Dreamweaver really comes into it's own when developing for a Microsoft Windows based hosting platform. In coming editions of Dreamweaver it would be great if Macromedia could take what they have done for ASP/Coldfusion and incorporate a more robust PHP/MYSQL model. Although to be fair many of these features can be added via the Macromedia Exchange area, although admittedly some come at an addition price.

For those that don't know Macromedia actively support the Macromedia Development community, by providing numerous support areas and also by maintaining their exchange forums. These forums allow developers to develop snippets of code for a specific task and package them as extensions which can easily be download and added to Macromedia Dreamweaver, thus extending and adding to the capabilities of the program.

Does that sound good? Well it's even better as many of these extensions are completely free of charge, all you need do is register with Macromedia, search and download them. Extensions such as WebAssist e-cart (ecommerce software) really do add to the capabilities of Dreamweaver admittedly at a price.

One major gripe I do have with the steady release of products from Macromedia is the incorporation and compatibility of these extensions. At the moment each time Macromedia release a new version of a product, each extension needs to be downloaded and reinstalled which is a major pain and for this reason alone I personally never bothered to upgrade to Dreamweaver MX, the effort for the return was just too much. If a feature that made extensions backward compatible was built into Dreamweaver my one gripe with each new release would be removed.

Getting back to the actual workings of Dreamweaver MX2004, what Macromedia have done is to develop a tool that allows anyone to develop data-driven, interactive websites for a variety of server platforms. It really is a breeze to build dynamic components such as user authentication, add order forms and carry out varies database queries, these can easily be added to your pages without the need to know any of the associated computer coding, it really is most often just a case of drag and drop and although this might not be to everyone's taste it has one major advantage in that somebody that is proficient with Dreamweaver can perhaps code an entire database driven website in around half the time often taken using other tools/techniques. Which for the web developer of today means you can charge less for each project, secure more work and generally compete in this global economy of ours.

Support for Cascading Style Sheets has vastly improved in this version of Dreamweaver so much so that I now have to study CSS techniques once again so that I can maximise the benefit offered by this support in Dreamweaver.

Other major features of Macromedia Dreamweaver MX2004 include:

• Image Editing Facilities - It is possible now to edit images to some extent from within Dreamweaver itself, especially as Dreamweaver now integrates mores fully with other Macromedia products. My own favourite is the ability to actually crop an image whilst still in Dreamweaver; this is an extremely useful feature.
• The ability to copy and paste Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel documents without losing all formatting information.
• The browser compatibility feature is also an extremely nice touch, having Dreamweaver inspect your code and then inform you of potential compatibility problems is a really nice feature.

Is Macromedia Dreamweaver MX2004 for everyone? Most certainly not, the range of features and the steep learning curve required to maximise the potential of Dreamweaver MX2004 puts it firmly into the Professional Web Designer Toolbox with it being system overkill for the hobby type Web Builders out there.

If you're involved in the process of building professional quality websites for a living then I would recommend that you upgrade to Macromedia Dreamweaver MX2004 immediately, the added features make this one of the best releases of 2003. And if you've never used Dreamweaver before you'll be pleasantly surprised at how much time and therefore money you save once you have mastered Dreamweaver over other development techniques.