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GCN Home > April 24, 2000 issue

Dreamweaver, Fireworks create a Web design powerhouse

Comprehensive suite is ideal for those who want total control over their code in visual design arena

By Steve Graves
Special to GCN

Macromedia Inc. has bundled its Dreamweaver 3 and Fireworks 3 applications as one complete package for Web development. The two programs, though hardly seamless, are tightly integrated for easy movement back and forth.

Dreamweaver’s WYSIWYG interface produces clean Hypertext Markup Language that should please the most finicky coder while giving the graphic artist pixel-level layout control.

The 3.0 Studio version can create image maps in the document window. It fully supports Dynamic HTML and cascading style sheets.

I found designing with layers particularly easy. Layers convert into tables at a click, producing HTML with a similar look for older 3.x browser versions. You can also convert tables to layers.

Pages can be saved as templates for content managers who post new data, and some page regions can remain editable while other regions are essentially write-protected. Changes made on the parent template pass to child pages, drastically reducing the labor of site makeovers and maintenance.

In Dreamweaver, you work by altering the properties of an object via palettes and inspectors, or by right-clicking to pop up a context menu. Apple Macintosh users will feel right at home with the numerous floating palettes, although the workspace seems crowded. You set preferences to specify which palettes and inspectors always appear on top of the document. You can reduce the number of palettes by combining them: Simply drag the tabs from one palette to the other.

One annoying problem I ran into was submarining—a palette would dive under the status bar on closing and I couldn’t get it to surface without restarting the program. Dreamweaver also crashed a couple of times when I had Fireworks open. But because this occurred only twice in two weeks of heavy use, I would call the program stable and relatively bug-free.

Not all properties are available through the palettes. For example, you can specify a background image under the page properties, but there is no option to make the background image a watermark as supported by Microsoft Internet Explorer. Coincidentally, I noticed that several functions supported by Microsoft browsers were omitted, though not those of Netscape browsers.

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