Adobe's Dreamweaver application (produced by Macromedia until 2005, when the company was taken over by the US giant) has been universally accepted as the industry-standard web development package for some years. As a WYSIWYG editor, Dreamweaver allows the user to see what they are creating as they create it, rather than simply typing long strings of code, and offers a wide range of tools to enhance pages with dynamic objects, navigation bars, frames, images, and much more besides.

Imagination into Reality

In all creative and developmental software, a bridge has to be built between what the user wishes to create, and the finished product. Adobe, and Macromedia before them, have focused on building an application that goes further than any other in crossing what can often be a substantial gulf.

The interface allows users to edit the code directly, edit the design as it appears (using tools that will be familiar from any art program), or a combination of the two, whilst straightforward drop-down menus provide direct access to content - such as tags, tables, scripts, images - which can be dropped into the page as the user desires. Through this, it becomes quite possible to make an effective bespoke webpage with no prior knowledge of HTML.

The latest incarnation of Dreamweaver, CS4, introduces a great improvement in ensuring that the page appears as the user intended it. The Live View option acts as an inbuilt web browser, rendering the page exactly as Apple's Safari browser would. This is a great boon to those new to web development, as it requires no separate understanding of how the finished product will look to the average viewer - and also to experienced and professional developers, who had hitherto needed to load their work in a separate browser to ensure progress is continuing along intended lines.

Recent studies by Pfeiffer Consulting have shown that the time taken to produce a page can reduce by as much as half with the use of Live View, rather than a standalone browser, for checking code and visualising the end result.

Taking Control of your Images

Placing images into your page has not always been without difficulty. If, having linked to your image and ensured its location in the right folder, you then need to change that picture, traditional coding (and, indeed, most WYSIWYG editors) requires you to manually replace every step of the process. Dreamweaver CS4, however, makes the whole process very simple indeed.

The application not only does all the work needed to insert the image in the first place - you just select an image on your computer, it does the rest. It utilises Adobe Photoshop to allow you to change an image that you've put into a webpage; once the image is updated in Photoshop, Dreamweaver automatically updates it on your page.

Real Improvements

Previous editions of Dreamweaver have been criticised for producing code that does not always fit with the standards of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These standards seek to ensure accessibility and long-term viability of web documents, and the W3C has disapproved of past versions of Dreamweaver introducing amounts of unnecessary code into pages, thus slowing browsers, and encouraging users to design pages through tables where doing so is deemed inappropriate.

Adobe, thankfully, have taken this criticism on board, and CS4 dramatically streamlines the code that Dreamweaver produces, and adheres far more closely to W3C standards. A Dreamweaver CS4 page can be relied upon to be as efficient and accessible as the user (and, more importantly, the viewer) needs it to be.

Getting the Most from Dreamweaver

It has not been by accident that Dreamweaver has come to its position of pre-eminence in the market, and its vast array of tools and options can be used to produce exactly the page that you need. However, the inevitable flipside of this is that Adobe have produced an application of great complexity. To turn it to your advantage, to get everything you want (and more) from the program, requires a great deal of expertise. Adobe themselves offer a support program - for an enormous