Adobe Dreamweaver Editor's Review

Develop and deploy professional looking, standards compliant websites with this multiplatform development tool.

Today, it's all about the internet.  If you're product, service, or other offering isn't available online in some way, you're going to miss out on a great deal of business. It may also be safe to say that your budding business may never get a chance to flourish without a website to help you hock your wares. This is one of the reasons why I like tools like Adobe DreamWeaver. It’s a multi-platform website development tool.

Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.5 is part of Adobe's award winning Creative Suite.  It's one of the industry-leading web authoring and editing tools; and it provides both visual and code-level capabilities for creating standards-based websites and designs for the desktop, smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices.

Designing for mobile devices and mobile computing is easy with the Multiscreen Preview panel. With its media query support, developers can use DreamWeaver styles and visualization rendering for a wide range of devices in a single panel. This is important as getting the view of your site right for a multitude of mobile devices can vastly effect not only visibility and marketing tactics, but sales as well.  To help improve your mobile interactivity, you can add code hinting with jQuery. It's an industry-standard JavaScript library, that makes it simple to add a wide range of interactivity to your web site. DreamWeaver comes with a number of different mobile phone templates to help you get a jump start.

DreamWeaver supports Standards and has been updated to support CSS3 and HTML5. Design View now supports media queries and applying different styles as you adjust screen dimensions. DreamWeaver helps you to code for the future with HTML5 via code hinting and Design view rendering support. Its Live View now includes support for QuickTime with its <video> and <svg> tags.  Its updated WebKit rendering engine gives you the ability to check your site on the fly, during development.  You can preview designs for multiple devices with real-time media query,  HTML5 and CSS3 support and capabilities.

Pro’s: Live View, CSS3 and HTML5 support

Con’s: Expensive; and not designed for the non-professional web developer

Conclusion: Adobe DreamWeaver CS5 is a professional web development package that can help serious web developers create smart, lively interactive websites for the desktop as well as most every mobile device and form factor available today. While the application is packed with features, it's truly a professional package and not meant for the casual web site creator. If this is you, you're going to have to spend a great deal of time getting to know every flavor, update and variant of HTML, Java, CSS etc. before you're even going to be able to touch on any of DreamWeaver's really cool features.

It's also very expensive, as most of the CS5 Suite is.  You need to be aware of this, as while Adobe's Creative Suite is one of the best web development platforms available, it's not for beginners or the light of wallet.