“Hate” is a word that I don’t use very often in the professional world. All too often this word is thrown around in casual conversation, and as a result it tends to lose the serious intensity and deliberate animosity intended by its definition. The word “hate” needs to be reserved in one’s vocabulary for people, places and things which truly deserve special attention. (My friends at Two and a Hater would probably agree.)
Dreamweaver sucks, and I hate it.
First, a small disclaimer: this post is directed at all visual web development tools. Dreamweaver happens to be the best known and most widely used application within this group, so my frustration and hate is rightly directed in its direction. These tools can be helpful to properly trained web professionals, but the fact is that most Dreamweaver users rely far too heavily on the visual tools and thus write terrible code.
Do a Google search for I hate Dreamweaver and you’ll get 172,000 results. It’s obvious that I’m not alone in my opinion, yet many thousands of companies and web developers continue to turn to tools like Dreamweaver to build and maintain their websites. This is a bad decision on a number of levels.
- Dreamweaver is for sissies. My biggest complaint against Dreamweaver is that most users will “write” their code using the visual tools. With little or no understanding of what they’re actually doing, the “developers” drag-and-drop tables, widgets, and god-only-knows what else onto a page and publish it to the web. While this sounds like a good idea in theory (anyone can build a website!), the reality is that the end-result is an unstable piece of garbage. Dreamweaver doesn’t teach the developer anything about good coding practices, and it undermines the idea that well-trained web development professionals should be paid appropriately for their skills.
- Dreamweaver generates terrible code. When I say that the end-result of Dreamweaver site is an unstable piece of garbage, I mean that the code Dreamweaver generates is not even close to W3C compliant. This is a really big deal because the worst-case scenario (which happens on a regular basis) is that your website doesn’t work in different browsers. When I look at the source code for a webpage, I can tell within about five seconds if it was written in Dreamweaver. It’s so obvious when I see things like FONT tags in about 700 places. . . any good web developer would be using CSS to control that.
- Dreamweaver encourages bad habits. Speaking of CSS, Dreamweaver encourages you to put CSS definitions in the page itself. From an architectural standpoint, this is just plain dumb – but since Dreamweaver makes no attempt to teach developers how to propertly structure a website, I’m not at all surprised. What’s worse is that this bad habit has a negative impact on how fast a webpage loads, so in effect Dreamweaver is making your website suck. If you have large website, magnify this problem (and similar situations) exponentially and you can see how bad it might get. Your visitors will get tired of waiting for your crappy site to load and leave.
- Dreamweaver loves PHP. PHP isn’t evil, but don’t get me started on how some developers think PHP/MySQL applications are the only solution to the world’s problems. I’ll save that rant for another post.
Here’s a real-world example. I just spent 7 hours rebuilding a page written by a PHP developer who uses Dreamweaver. His PHP code was average, but the HTML was so bad that I had to scrap it altogether. It is so obvious that he didn’t know what he was doing, and it really bothers me that I had to spend an entire day rewriting his code. Furthermore, the client is getting billed twice (his hours plus mine) for essentially the same work because I couldn’t make what should have been a simple fix to a handful of lines of HTML and CSS.
The bottom line is that I hate Dreamweaver. I hate the poor code it creates. And I’m making it my personal mission to discourage its use everywhere I go.
About Arthur Kay 
We at Two and a Hater, have gone so far as to develop rules for hatred, so that the term can not be abused or misused. You, my friend are perfectly within the acceptable confines in using it here. Feel free to rip dreamweaver some more.
Alternatively, doesn’t it work out that you get business by people who have messed up site by using a dreamweaver or a golive?
Thank You!! For Spaking the truth.. Adobe Golive user.
da best. Keep it going! Thank you
I’m so sick of people thinking they can build a website with that piece of crap program. I can tell when my graphics girl thinks she got over on me using it because it results in all sorts of extra tags that I have to go back in and remove! If anyone has seen the 15 p tags or more list you know what I mean. I wish those editors would fall off the face of the planet!!!
~ signed, a web developer that learned HTML on a webtv – no excuse for Dreamweaver – EVER
I loved, loved, loved GoLive and I tried to switch to Dreamweaver on this site–working one year on it now. I hate, hate, hate it. It never does what it says. It looks good in the program and then when you upload it–IT’S NOT THE SAME!! The CSS for the spry menu is complicated, yet the code seems simple enough. I am an artist–not a cody I am about to give up totally on web design after this painful experience of gastrointestinal cancer.
I don’t know code that well but I hate dreamweaver (notice I don’t capitalize that godforsaken name) bc its not intuitive at all!!!! And yet its Adobe, well not really, its Macromedia. Photoshop and Illustrator are beautiful bc if you play around with it you can figure out how things work. I figured out most things before taking classes with them and now I use both regularly for my artwork with no problems. nightmareweaver on the other hand is the least intuitive piece of shit I have ever used in my life and I will NEVER again waste my money on another OVERPRICED piece of crap like that. I’m just gonna give my psd’s to coder’s who wanna make some money. They can handle it, I’m not… I’m right brained aka I HAVE NO DESIRE TO DEAL WITH COLD, UNINSPIRED, INORGANIC, CONVOLUTED COMPUTER LANGUAGE. FUUUUUUUCCCCCKKKKK TTTTTTHAAAAAATTTTTTTT. I hope the developers rot in hell and I will bathe in the blood of their children :3 Have a nice day oh and anyone who doesn’t like my comments can DIIIIIEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!
Dreamweaver is the most inappropriate name for anything ever.
It suggests light hearted, whispie, fuzzie, niceness that allows you to put your creativity into action.
In reality it is a heavyweight, boring, nurdie, geekie, unintuitive interface for doing highly structured codeing that only allows you to put thing in boring rows, columns and boxes.
After years of development CS5 has now got an option to do rounded corners.. Yippee.. In another ten years it may let you do a circle!! Even MS Word could do that years ago. The program has no tools or interface that lets you lay out and move elements in any creative way. It is like lead type and blocks for print in cold metal 80 years ago.
One day soon technology will allow designers to create web and other media as they have done on paper and now in programs like inDesign and Photoshop… with coding happening somehow you need never worry about. When that day comes all the smug, over paid “web developers” will be as redundant as Linotype compositors, Compugraphic typesetters and paste up staff.
dreamweaver is a nightmare. My gripe about dreamweaver is the stupid site management tool. IT DOESN’T WORK. I say it doesn’t work because it doesn’t frigging work. I can modify files, add files, and do various things to the site and when I tell dw to update the site it doesn’t recognize the the new files. so I have to upload the files individually. What is the point of Dw? I’ve switched to Flux. It is far superior to dw with CSS. DW is pathetic. I’ll be switching to Coda soon for the straight code part.
Dreamweaver is a dull tool.
I hate how I have to run around in circles with Dreamweaver; I make a mistake in the CSS Style rule section, like deleting something I shouldn’t have, and I can’t undo it! Photoshop, Illustrator and practically every other program let you undo a mistake with Ctrl+Z or via the menu, but DW ends up giving me the “Run Command” message. I don’t even know what the hell that means! So then I just delete the CSS Style rules I made and remake them. Seriously, how hard should it be to just be able to UNDO something?!
The best word that can describe DW is simple, dam retard software. Now meter what you do, in what tag you are, it give you the same options. Never follow the user what is doing, so he can give only the logical options. Like open “ul” or “ol” tag, inside the innately sense give you all possible tags, you can write only “li” tags inside hollow. The intellisense defiantly has no “intelli” and it is hard to say that have sense…
They have created special form for every possible scenario, and to show the form you have to remember exactly where to click and what 20 steps to do so the DW understand and give the logical working context forms.
I have filing that the programmers that write this crap don’t know how to use it…
The problem is that there are too many web developers that are in same level like the DW
Sorry for my bad English, and if I have been too harsh, but I am web developer and I have to tech DW to my students, and having the experience from other editors, I know how stupid this software is…
Thx
It seems to me that Arthur Kay is criticizing the users of
Dreamweaver and not the software itself. This is typical of
code-freaks whom pride themselves on code design versus design of
the actual website. All they care about is that written code is
efficient, readable, well-commented, non-redundant etc. They have
no mind for aesthetics, and are incapable of visualizing a
pleasing, well-thought, stimulating user experience in a website.
You need designers and coders for good web design. They keep each
other in check. The designer creates the look and feel of a site
and the programmer does all the anal-retentive coding by hand using
their tool of choice. Dreamweaver is just a tool, and it can be
used in many different ways. There are numerous, well-known design
firms that use DW as their platform for web development. It’s best
to use something like Fireworks to do the designing, and then use
Dreamweaver to compose, trouble-shoot and test the code that makes
the design work.
You have a point Skeptic… but code DOES need to be correct if you want a design to display correctly across a variety of browsers and platforms.
My post is critical of the software users, but any good software tool discourages mistakes. Dreamweaver is the worst tool of it’s kind for failing to do that.
And I find it interesting that you rag on developers who insist on correct code – designers are often far more anal about the little details like this. Is the pot calling the kettle black?
I agree with you, including the ‘pot calling the kettle
black’ – However, I feel that both designers and programmers should
recognize that each area (visual design and program design) are
equally important. Also it should be understood that Dreamweaver is
a maintenance and testing platform and should not ever be used for
visual design. One would never know that by the way Adobe
advertises and promotes DW. I also think that the very
non-intuitive DW user interface is caught in what I call the
‘nostalgia grip’; Hence Adobe is hesitant to make major changes to
the interface (to make it more consistent with it’s other
offerings), because they fear a mass rebellion would ensue from
their DW user base. They would lose many long-time users of the DW
platform. Also, one might consider that the DW interface is
designed for left-brain biased individuals, where function trumps
ease of use (form); i.e. the programmer/coder enjoys a familiar
environment, that which they know already, and strongly protests
cosmetic and organizational changes to the user interface. They
hate this. Let me rattle on a bit more – The programmer is also
threatened by any newly developed software that would accomplish
web design for visual designers and also, at the same time produce
clean, concise, efficient code. Perhaps even dynamic code. I think
that something like that will be soon available.
Skeptic – designers and developers do need to work together. In spite of our love/hate relationship, projects benefit from the POV each discipline brings to the table.
Also, I would welcome any tool that allowed users (designers) to create websites visually with clean code. It would make my job easier – no need to be threatened because designers won’t be developing the interactive software features anyway
“by a PHP developer who uses Dreamweaver.”
Since PHP is mainly a web-oriented language, a programmer who doesn’t know proper HTML + CSS should’nt be called a PHP Developer.
Vim/Emacs FTW
i like dreamweaver. i started off as a front end web designer but i was able to learn a lot about coding in dreamweaver.
i started off working in the DESIGN window…then worked my way to the split DESIGN/CODE screen, and now i work mostly in code…
i was a great learning tool for me to start learning code – HTML, light Java, Jquery, CSS and more..
The only thing I like about Dreamweaver is the spilt design.
few years ago, when I wanted to learn stuffs about HTML/CSS, i started off with notepad2 and gave up withing two weeks. 1 year later, a friend of mine shared me a copy of DW, i picked up fast, because of spilt view feature. I am able to understand what it would look like after writing HTML/CSS Codes. And now for last two years, I have been developing Webpages for clients.
What annoys me is just when teenagers use the GUI to make websites and think it makes them good web developers.