Average Rating: 
Rating: - A Great Value for your money
Ok first thing I want to say, I do not work for Macromedia, and my only motivation in writing this, is to help you. This is THE best suite to design, code, and publish a very cool, engaging website. I do not know of any other software package that comes close. In my opinion Adobe tried and failed, (plus it costs a ton), Bill Gates crew is not even in the same game. The only challenge is the learning curve you will encounter, if you are not familiar with Macromedia's products. Now this may be a little presumptuous on my part, but I would go so far as to say if you are not using Dreamweaver and flash, you are not in the web development game seriously. I would guess that some of your efforts might have ended up on "Webpage's that [stink]" website. This is a tremendous value and you could make a career out of mastering anyone of the applications included in Macromedia Studio.
Rating: - The best I've used.
I have used many products, from straight editors like TextPad and NoteTab to Cold Fusion Studio and Microsoft FrontPage. I have their strengths and weaknesses. I personally prefer Macromedia for it's suite approach of tying the products together for high powered web development. I especially use Dreamweaver and Fireowrks extensively together. Dreamweaver also can handle ASP, JSP, PHP and ColdFusion development. Then you also get Flash, Freehand and ColdFusion Developer to boot. Tell me another that works with all and has all the powerful tools that Macromedia has and I will definitely be interested!
Buy it before December 31, 2002, as it goes up after that. It's now... on Macromedia's site and about... at Amazon after rebates. It's a great investment. There's also a cheaper Macomedia web design product out there now called Contribute. I paid an introductory $99 to check it out for my daughter who is also starting to build web pages at 6 years old. So far it seems easy to use for people who don't want to get into the coding side of things. The Macomedia Studio MX suite is definitely the way to go if you have the money. It's well worth it!
Rating: - Definitely the way to go
Having become adept with another well-known web development package (let's call the company that makes it "Brand M") I became disenchanted with the odd bits of HTML code that crept into my increasingly-complicated website design. "Brand M" is easy to use, but it can sometimes put weird HTML stuff on your page that is damned hard to figure out how it got there, why it needs to be there, and even harder to remove if it behaves oddly. A friend recommended I jump to Macromedia Dreamweaver. I decided to spring for the entire studio as you also get Coldfusion, Flash and Freehand. I also got the "Solutions Kit" which contains a tutorial for learning Dreamweaver. This is by far the best package of web development software I have tried. (I've used about four or five over the years.) For one thing, the split screen feature (part of the "roundtrip" structure of Dreamweaver) allows you to type in a WYSIWYG window while seeing the actual HTML tags appear above. This reinforces the learning process, which is good because though WSIWYG is convenient and easy, you need know know HTML tags to de-bug, update and edit your site in ways WSIWYG editors cannot do for you. The lower left status bar in the main window shows just what HTML tag you are currently working on. While the Dreamweaver work window can look sparse and the icon button look confusing, the tutorial quickly sorted this out for me. The learning curve is steeper than with the "Brand M" web software, but the power of Flash, the ability to code without the software adding funky HTML tags you didn't want and which are hard to debug is worth the price. Macromedia makes several upgrade pathways available to the purchaser depending on how many previous products you have bought. This preserves your investment in Macromedia. The Solutions kit is essential if you are new to Macromedia, and it also includes an e-learning tool for developing e-learning applications. This is really a bonus and one I can use at work. Macromedia sends a lot of helpful communications, so it pays to register the software to get on their users list. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED for anyone who is determined to learn web design and HTML.
|
