Because we are dedicated to honest customer opinions Dreamweaver 8 (CD-ROM), we have also included Amazon's customer reviews for this item (of which 5 are displayed below). Amazon customers have given Dreamweaver 8 an average rating of 3.0/5.
Top Amazon Review
The best you can get.. Dreamweaver is excellent for people who wish to code in pretty much everything from HTML through PHP and PERL to Cold Fusion and ASP! And for those of you who are not into coding you can use the WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor that allows dreamweaver to do all your work for you. It is quirky to learn as it follows Adobe's style of not following any layout known in existence but once you have the basic knowlege then your possibilities are endless! I use dreamweaver for all my coding and to upgrade my IPB 2.2. I know the price seems crazily high (and it is) but it is very much worth the purchase.
Customer Review 1
Easier to learn how to hand code. I am in my 3rd year of a university degree in Multimedia and Website Development and I have stopped using Dreamweaver. I find it much easier to hand code everything. I know that I have studied (x)html and CSS in detail but believe me it's not that difficult to learn. Buy the Headfirst html with xhtml and css book and in a couple of days you will be well on your way to building sites just as well as you could with DW. The book will cost a fraction of the amount that DW costs, and you will absorb it in a fraction of the time it takes to absorb DW. Your code will be tight and neat, the mystery of html/css will be dispelled and your sites will pass validation with no extraneous code whatsoever. Try the book before you try Dreamweaver, you will not be dissapointed.
Customer Review 2
Hard work. Somebody asked me the other day if I could get them a copy of Dreamweaver because they wanted to set up their first website. I laughed in their face. Just because the packaging looks friendly does not mean this is a user friendly package. And it is not for beginners, my goodness no.
I was okay with Dreamweaver3, but now things have got a lot more complicated with the advent of CSS and I'm floundering with this.
It's just so difficult sometimes to do the simplest job that I rarely have the patience to figure out how. CSS means that you can get into endless difficulties just trying to change the size of text, or something equally simple.
If you know what you're doing with HTML and CSS you'll be okay, but isn't Dreamweaver supposed to shield you from some of the mechanics of that? Well, it doesn't.
And I really hate the interface. Creating a new style is so counter-intuitive that I've never managed to do it the same way twice.
And when you've created a style, you'd expect it to show up in the Style menu, so you can just highlight text and apply that style. Think again. It's so complicated I can barely begin to explain how you actually do it.
Hmm. So if you're already an HTML/CSS expert, you'll get along well enough with this. But will you need it? You may find it easier to do without the clumsy interface and build from scratch.
Customer Review 3
Excellent Evolutionary Upgrade. I've been using Dreamweaver for quite a few years. Last 2 years using MX 2004, which I found to be excellent but not without it's flaws (and a habit of crashing sometimes).After 2 days of solid use of Dreamweaver 8 I am very pleased I upgraded. Its an evolutionary upgrade - lots of small but significant improvements on MX 2004. Little stuff like the way that in MX 2004 a very long line of ASP code would require scrolling to the right to see it. Under version 8 it automatically wraps the line so no need to scroll. It doesnt change the code and actually wrap it - just the way it displays.The CSS interface changes are not radical but they do help locate CSS styles. The document I'm working on right now has a lot of CSS classes defined in a separate file. Finding the CSS code for a particular tag was a nightmare before. Now I can located it with a couple of clicks.I could go on and on but this is a good upgrade and from the point of view of a coder it's been a real productivity booster.
Customer Review 4
New features either do little or hinder performance. I was eagerly awaiting the release of this version of DW. I use the program almost everyday. I was especially looking forward to more CSS support. But the new CSS panels harly help at all - they don't present information very clearly and don't make editing styles any easier. In fact, I still use the right-click 'edit' as I used to - instead of the new CSS panels. Also - the new version placescode for layers in both the head and body sections - making it verydifficult to make layer positioning editable in templates. So something that was easy in DW MX is not much harder to do in DW 8. There are many other additional features, but for someone like me who uses design view predominantly, they hardly makes any difference at all. I'd stay with DWMX until DW 9 comes out.
