Many Many years ago when I first started web development I discovered that there were tools to help create web pages. Off I skipped to my local PC World. I caught the eye of an assistant and explained what I wanted. He didn't have a clue! You have to understand this was 98 and Dreamweaver was not even 1 year old. He pointed to an area of a shelf. Sitting alone was a product called Coral Web 'something or other'. It did an ok job really as far as my knowledge of development went and I created a couple of web pages (which I saved on a 3.5 floppy!) Predominantly it was a design tool with a notepad type feature for coding which saw little daylight. After a year or so I discovered Dreamweaver. I think I started with version 2 and instantly found it amazing. It could do anything. It was great at table layouts (it was the year 2000 remember!). Things I remember about it. There was a tracing feature allowing the use of a background comp image which you could trace and use to build your site. You could use (what Dreamweaver called) layers. Layers are in fact divs. I remember that you could revert all layers to tables for those browsers which don't support divs (We were working with browser versions 4 and and less!) If we only knew what was to come with IE6. I think I might have chosen a different career path!. This version of Dreamweaver also introduced us to templating. Locking areas of a page and allowing access to other sections was a way of making your site editable by users who were not confident enough (or trusted) to edit the site in its full glory. I remember the JavaScript behaviours panel with fondness and all that code they generated... Wow! It was witchcraft. Everything about Dreamweaver made life so easy right down to the final FTP process. Brilliant. Where would I be without it? Then came along Drumbeat. Drumbeat was an ASP orientated application development tool which provided the means to create ASP apps without the need to code. A drag and drop tool box which provided the hobbyist a way to developing something which never quite worked as was intended. It was a step further though. I remember researching this product but didn't jump in at the time. I did buy into Ultradev though. It was the early 2000's and I hadn't even heard of PHP. Lets put how early this time was into perspective. PHP had just introduced Super Globals ($_GET, $_POST, $_SESSION) in version 4.1. Yes. Super Globals were a new feature at the time. Ultradev was another brilliant edition. Even the name sounded awesome. I taught myself everything about it. I immersed myself into it and started to develop some rudimentary Content Management Systems. Above all I was enjoying it. This was the status quo for a year or so. I never really produced anything ground breaking though. Around this time I got a break working for a web design studio and we played around with Ultradev although the underlying code constantly caused problems. So much so that I took time out away from these tools and started to learn exactly what this code did. Starting with classic ASP I progressed on to PHP (due to a work requirement rather than a chosen path) and started to see the light. I could write what Dreamweaver did using 75% less code. Eureka! Now I understood and realised how much time I had wasted trying to make Dreamweaver do stuff it would never be able to. OK lets get this straight. I am not having ago at the product and still look at it with fondness. It does a great job even though it is a tad pricey.

Summary

Dreamweaver is a great tool and there was a time where you would have to know how to wield this product in order to bag a job. I don't think this is the case any more as most companies allow you to use whatever. Notepad++ is my favourite coding tool at the minute . It is great for quick edits, its light weight, it has a file explorer, it has an FTP client but best of all its completely FREE. OK it does not have a design view but what better way to view your site than use your browser. You also don't get a button which when clicked writes a Face Book clone. Its a 'roll your sleeves up' and 'get stuck in' tool but the rewards are mega. You can at last call yourself a developer. Check it out here...