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Why Real Web Developers Don't Use DreamWeaver
By Paul A Clarke

We know there are Web Designers and there are Web Developers, and that they are very different animals altogether (check out our article on the difference between Web Designers and Web Developers), but they both, naturally, have a pride in what they do. A Web Developer derives his or her pride from staying on concept and delivering a website which performs as quickly as it possibly can.

It's in the developers interest to make sure the pages s/he develops use as little of the resources available as possible. And when I say resources, I mean bandwidth, and I mean web server power (CPU and memory capacity). So Developers strive to minimise the consumption of these resources because they want the website they are developing to be fast to appear on users screens, especially if the website is using a shared hosting platform. And let's not forget, the customer wants that too, even though it will unlikely to have been specified in the brief.

If you're an old programmer who can remember trying to shave your code down to fit in 1K of RAM (yes, the original Spectrum computer came with 1K of RAM and your program had to live in there) and you've been programming ever since like me, then your fight for code efficiency will be built-in. The computer I was developing on at work at that time had 64K of RAM, total luxury, but there was 8 of us on it, so efficiency was king.

These days memory and processing power are almost secondary considerations (except perhaps for gaming), but they shouldn't be. If you program your website to use as little resource as possible then your website is going to perform noticeably better than the website which has been developed without such considerations.

Which brings me to Dreamweaver, and why we use text editors (UltraEdit actually) instead. It's not just Dreamweaver, other so called WYSIWYG editors such as FrontPage produce similar inefficiencies. The problem is that these editors are designed for use by people who don't know how to code up xhtml and css from scratch (let alone JavaScript or PHP/ASP) and so the software produces the html it thinks you need but which is full of redundant and/or inefficient code. The result is a slow to execute/download/render page and you would be so much better off if you edited the html directly.

In fact, if you learn html and css, after a few months I guarantee you will be able to type in the markup/code you need faster than you can click all the necessary boxes and fill out the necessary forms in Dreamweaver. Don't learn Dreamweaver, learn html/css instead!

Then there's the Microsoft Office suite which will allow you to save a document as html. Don't do it! The complete and utter mess it produces is almost criminal! Pages and pages of utter nonsense, all of which has to be downloaded.

So, we don't use Dreamweaver because it produces inefficient code, and we completely recommend learning xhtml and css instead. It's free to learn xhtml and css, Dreamweaver isn't, not by a long chalk!

About the Author:
You may want to view our related article on the difference between rel=nofollow Web Designers and Web Developers. Paul Clarke is the Managing Director of Web Equip Ltd. A Web Design company in Sheffield, UK. You can visit Web Equip at http://www.webequip.co.uk for Web Design Sheffield.