[megabyte]

Just finished a small course on building websites using Dreamweaver...so now i am fully qualified

Now do i purchase Dreamweaver cs4 or do i rob a bank and go for the more advanced proffesional Design Premium etc etc

I donot want to become a full time website developer, all i want to do is a few website ideas i have for myself and of course if a mate wants one i may oblige.......but i want to be able to do them properly with back offices and content managment ability. I am not interested in Flash or 3D type websites.

My question is to those who are well up in this field and do they find Dreamweaver lacks anything to be able to do these sites and maybe need the more advanced software or am i ok with just Dreamweaver and my now extensive web developing knowlege.

Thanks

[Hybr!d]

Never saw the point, I mean you can get hundreds of thousands of free templates online and just edit them in notepad to your liking.

[serverguy]

Dreamweaver is good don't get me wrong. It is a very nice tool to work with, and I find does speed things up a lot.

I also sometimes use it on PHP work, and find it works well. I don't like the way it handles databases much.

But I think more important is actually having Photoshop and I also personally use Fireworks a lot.

The other programs are not really necessary, but Fireworks or Photoshop is a must unless you like Gimp.

But as Dave says, there are so many templates available, a lot of the time I question the point in starting from scratch, when if I did I would basically be copying what is already done in a template, except on very unusual websites.

Even on data driven sites, working from a template is still nice because you can get coding straight away, knowing that the site will still look good. When I go from scratch, I find I start coding before I have decided what I want the site to look like, and it ends up a bit of a mess for a while.

But overall, I wouldn't be without the Adobe suite (on a student el cheapo license for me of course )

[Hybr!d]

Ultimately it depends what you want to end up doing.

But, the thing is these days no one codes from scratch, I mean if you want to setup a forum you buy a vBulletin script, a ecommerce site you buy an oscommerce script. Wordpress can do a hell of a lot more than a blog, all the top online magazines and portals run off wordpress or joomla cms etc. again, all scripts. You just tweek the template/design and bit's and pieces to make it you own, all the back end is done from the start and you get updates and support. A lot of the time for free.

All that has really done away with coding from scratch and the need for a WYSIWYG package.

When I eventually make the root of computer juice into a news/reviews portal/magazine it will run or wordpress. 10 mins to upload the free script and then a few days modifying the template code so it is in uniform with how the forum looks. Nothing built from the ground up. No need to, wordpress are way better coders and they give it away for nothing.

I would learn HTML then PHP, rather than a specific full blown web design software package.

[oobrokensilence]

I think doing it the old fashion way in notepad is the way to go.

[Black Magic]

Dreamweaver CS4 is heaven for any website developper, but the price tag is wayyyyyy too high for my liking. Nvu or Kompozer do a great job, exept with the <textarea> tag that seems to screw up some part or another of the page's code. If you want to create your own stylesheets, go with EditIx.