Can Wordpress Kill Adobe Dreamweaver?
You might think it’s a silly question, but think about it. The average Joe can now build a website from scratch with very little knowledge using Wordpress.com. If you have a descent web host, you can install the self-hosted version of Wordpress with one click via Fantastico and never have to FTP a file. The ease of use and focus on usability by Wordpress has enabled basically anyone with half a brain to design their own website.
How will this affect Dreamweaver? From my personal experience, in the past several months I have only opened up Dreamweaver once to create a table for a Wordpress site. With over 40 websites currently online, only one of my sites was designed with Dreamweaver and is a static html website. The other 39+ sites are all using Wordpress or another CMS / open source back-end.
Why? It’s easy. Using Fantastico I can install a basic framework of a website in one click. I can quickly FTP my favorite Wordpress theme and plug-ins, and in a short time I have a very nice looking dynamic website. If I get tired of the look of the website, I can change the theme with one click. That’s simply not possible with your typical non-template static website created in Dreamweaver.
So why pay $399 for Dreamweaver CS3 when I can download the latest Wordpress version from Wordpress.org for free? The list of reasons I have for buying Dreamweaver are getting shorter by the month, and I expect as more advanced plug-ins and themes are developed for Wordpress, the less I’ll be using Dreamweaver. I don’t think I’m the only one…
Filed under: Web Design
I don’t think people will stop using Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver serves many opportunities. It’s easy to edit your website or make some changes on it.
Hi, i am new in wordpress but would like to find out the pros and cons between wordpress and joomla. Best Regards. Tom K.
Wordpress vs Joomla? I’ve been a keen fan of Joomla for several years now, but more recently have been building Wordpress 2.3 sites. Why?
Without getting into the technicalities, Joomla is very powerful and super-flexible. Like Wordpress, lots of templates and it has good user management features, add-ons, components, etc.
But for many users, I think Joomla is a technological overkill. If you’re selling into a large company and need tools to define loads of categories, content and how they’re displayed then go with Joomla. I have one particular Joomla site with dozens of categories and products, images, videos and Joomla did it with relative ease. Totally impossible with Wordpress.
But if it’s a club, home or small business client with modest needs and budget who just wants a slick self-managed site, then Wordpress makes a lot of sense. It is also more sociable, with trackbacks, pinging etc and ability to ‘connect’ more with social networks without doing to much.
It’s also incredibly quick and easy to setup compared with Joomla, although with Fantastico everything is quick. But upgrading Joomla does seem to take more work and care than Wordpress. Wordpress also seems to alert you to new versions of the system and plugins. Nice. But like Joomla, there are almost too many plugins these days. Good and bad ones. Like most, I’ve settled on a few favourites.
I think the only disappointment I have with Wordpress is when I want the widgets/side menu items to change with each user page or category selection. I use this capability a lot in Joomla to bring in new menus and elements as I take readers from one area to another, but it’s not easily done with Wordpress, yet…
However in spite of a few menu and layout short-comings I’d have to say I’m hooked on Wordpress, having now found a dozen perfect plug-ins that give me all the features I need for 80% of my small business clients. For the others, I use trusty Joomla.
And why would anyone want a boring, static, non-cms website when Wordpress and hundreds of amazing design templates is freely available?
Please excuse my direct way of saying this, but your assumption is very very silly. Ofcourse one can install Wordpress and start blogging right away, but there is a large number of web developers out there and they won’t start using wordpress to develop a let’s say: online shop. So my answer is no, Dreamweaver will not die.
Say it however you want on here, get geeky drunk with it and thanks for your comment. But, there are simple plug-ins for wordpress to add a shopping cart or integrate with a popular php shopping cart…and those features and additions will only improve with time. It’s too easy to use wordpress, and this is coming from someone who has geekily used Dreamweaver since 1996.
The trouble here is that you’re confusing the purposes of the programs. DreamWeaver is for creating websites - including the templates that are still required for WordPress to present anything. WordPress is a presentation and content management framework that handles storage and retrieval of data, as well as displaying that data through preset templates.
For the casual user, who has no experience with HTML, WP is an excellent tool for self publishing - but only because others have written the hundreds of templates freely available for use.
However, for more advanced users, WP is little more than another tool in the box. Sure, I run a few sites where open sourced templates work well enough… but I also run several where I’ve sat down for a weekend or two with DreamWeaver and written everything up myself, making use of the API provided by WP as needed. I’ll tell you from experience: WP has yet to include a function along the lines of, ‘make_my_site_look_awesome()’ - that’s my job.
The availability of plugins really don’t make any difference in the grand scheme of things either - again, all that they do is serve content. The presentation of that content still has to be handled somehow. Sure, most shopping carts are going to have some built-in presentation templates - they wouldn’t be worth much out of the box if they didn’t. But default templates aren’t going to be good enough for most users of a shopping cart plugin. Actually, I’d question the sanity of anybody using WP+plugin for any retail service other than news serving… it’s the electronic equivalent of using a screwdriver as a splitting wedge. Sure, it might work for a little while - but there are far, FAR better tools.
Which brings us back to my whole point - WP and DreamWeaver are both tools, and they both serve a different purpose. You’re doing both a disservice by trying to suggest that they’re the same.
IMHO, I don’t think WordPress would want to kill Dw. Dreamweaver and WordPress can live in harmony! In fact, I’d go as far to say that as of recent, Dw may actually start lovin’ WP. Check out the post, screen shots and then some (but be kind -its my first post).
http://www.themedreamer.com/news/dwloveswp
This is a Dw extension that is aimed at bridging the gap between WP & Dw. I developed this extension to give you a ‘draft/simulated’ view of a theme file in Dw’s Design View and help you navigate WordPress’s Template Tags,
As you have used Dreamweaver but moved over to Wordpress I’m interested in the types of sites that you’ve managed to create using Wordpress.
I need to create about 8 sites and am looking at the options but wondered if you’d be willing to give out the web addresses of sites you’ve made using wordpress. Thanks.