: Is DreamWeaver more efficient rather than coding manually I have a client who want's me to use Dreamweaver for a project. I've always used Photoshop and Illustrator for mockups and coded the

@BetL875

For the sake of good client relations, you absolutely must find out why they are asking for the site to be built in DW. While jag2007's answer is correct, keep in mind that you will lose more clients, faster, by being arrogant than because of any technical deficiencies.

From the client's perspective, there would be two reasons to ask for something so specific:


Some opinion leader told them this is what they need. (The OL could be the CEO's mentor, or the CEO's wife's favorite nephew. Tread carefully.)
They want to use DW for site maintenance, but don't realize it doesn't much matter how the code is created.


In a situation like this, your best bet is probably to smile, nod, and ask who will be using DW to maintain the site. If there is an answer to that question, get this person into the conversation and let them know they'll be able to fully maintain the site with DW. That may be all that's needed, and you can go ahead with your own preferred coding environment.

If they need templates (and they might, because outside of a CMS it's one of the most efficient ways to enable safe global site updates by less-experienced webmasters), you can either code these by hand or just go ahead and use DW. It actually has many efficiencies as a coding environment if you play on its strengths.

If they're clueless, and this all came from the boss's wife's second cousin's whiz-kid teenager, then nod, smile, build the site how you want and tell them they'll be able to work with it in DW without problems (which is true) without saying you're NOT going to build it in DW.

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@Hamm6457569

I've been using Dreamweaver for over six years, I finally dumped it two days ago. Every time I fired it up, I felt this sinking feeling in my shoulders. That's how bloated this thing is. If you're on a Mac, try TextMate.

It's exactly what I need, which is a lightweight editor that has the features I need that something like Notepad or Textedit won't provide- namely, color coding of the syntax and a web preview window that auto-refreshes in real time.

The thing I miss here from Dreamweaver is it's built in file manager. Though not the best, it allows me to sync files to the remote server, and even autosync on every save. I believe TextMate has some configurable options to hook it up to Terminal for file management, but I'm not familiar with any Linux commands.

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@Shelley591

There are aspects of DW that could be useful for the client. They are CMS-like features that allow you to 'lock' parts of pages so they aren't easily messed with by others so that the client can use DW to make manual updates themselves.

You can also set up sites to use Contribute, which the client may wish to use.

I wouldn't recommend those solution, but they are somewhat valid reasons for a client to request DW-friendly files.

All that said, as stated, DW edits plain text files, so you can certainly use whatever tools you want. If the above reasons are why the client is requesting DW, you can always do that as a last-step.

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@BetL875

Wow thats crazy. First of all, would you go to your doctor and insist on which tools he used to perform your surgery? Or your dentist?

Or would you take your car to your mechanic and tell them which tools he should use to repair your alternator?

Of cours not. And your clients request that you use a particular tool over another to perform your job is just as ridiculous.

What I would suggest is that you dig deeper with the client to find out why they are making said request. Get to their reasoning behind it.

It could be that they have some expectation about the final product which they have the impression only Dreamweaver can produce (such as CMS functionality or maintaining the code themselves) in which case you'll need to educate them and manage their expectations.

As far as DW as a tool versus any other code editor - it's the worst. Don't use it. It's a bloated piece of software and it's auto generated code is very bad for several reasons I won't go into now.

You are much better off writing semantic, meaningful markup by hand.

Good luck.

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