Is Dreamweaver dying?

It was great having the guest lecturer take the class through the basics of creating a website with Dreamweaver. I thought it was really interesting and helpful. Not having (any) prior experience with the program, I thought I’d do a little research into it − and I came across some interesting opinions. On March 5th, Tom Arah posted an article on PC Pro called “I’m sorry but Dreamweaver is dying”. As a designer he states that Dreamweaver is the best HTML/CSS page-based editor available, and that the real problem is that the nature of the internet is changing. In his opinion, new web applications offer features that Dreamweaver doesn’t: built-in commenting, RSS feeds and voting for example.

Web 2.0 isn’t an empty slogan, it marks a fundamental break with the past and Dreamweaver lies on the wrong side of it. So is this the end for Dreamweaver and the traditional Dreamweaver-based web designer? Eventually yes. In the relatively near future every website will be a dynamically-generated web application and all of today’s sites built on multiple static pages will be ripped out and replaced.

Arah believes that in the future all websites will be built by content management systems such as today’s Joomla and Drupal, which specialise in Web 2.0 sites.

Our website, Chockrocks,  is coming along great. It looks fantastic and I’m VERY pleased with the content we’ve been steadily uploading. I’ve started writing my second piece of content, which will be an unfavourable review of the over-hyped and underwhelming Brunetti’s in Carlton. It continually disappoints me and yet is consistently crowded with customers. Baffling.

This week’s reading featured Luke Wroblewski’s “Sign Up Forms Must Die” which promotes the philosophy of sites asking for “gradual engagement” from new users rather than have them fill out forms like many sites do. It had really never dawned on me how annoying it is to first become a member of a site in order to use it until just recently when I tried to view a friend’s profile on facebook and I was refused access since I’m the last person on earth not to have an account myself. I was immediately asked to become a member. In fact, the homepage is the sign up form. I think that the idea of inviting a new user into a site by showing them how it works and letting them get their hands dirty right away (thereby seeing immediate results) and then asking them to fill out a sign up form is very clever.

I’ve been linked to! Fitzroyalty has mentioned Reneespeak in the recent post “breakfast bagel at Alimentari on Brunswick St” while blogging about an interview he had with a journalism student. They spoke about citizen journalism and how it differs from traditional journalism. I was surprised to read that professional journalists consider their audience less than citizen journalists. However, I can see how citizen journalists would have a much better understanding audience thanks to comments and linking by other users.

Dreamweaver remains the best HTML/CSS page-based editor available.

The real problem for Dreamweaver and for its users is that the nature of the web is changing dramatically.