GoLive or Dreamweaver?

Travis, my argument isn't that I think one tool is better than another, but that I feel that the term cheating is an inappropriate way to describe the process of using these tools to create.

I think that using tools that work for the job in-hand is OK, whatever the tools are. Personally, I generally use GoLive for simple, effective, cross media publishing (largely due to the fact that I use all of the other CS tools, and it integrates very well with VersionCue), but I don't claim it's flawless by any means. The decision to remove the dynamic bindings palette is still confusing me! Why Adobe, why?

I had a very quick look at your review of GL, and it seems to me that you have probably got quite a lot of experience with DW, and very little with GL. Is that correct? I only say this, because many of the points that you have made are actually incorrect. DW and GL are different packages developed by different vendors, and as such they behave quite differently. Your review reads more like a comparison of the 2 packages side by side, with DW being the standard which GL should echo. You're bound to be disappointed if this is the way that you measure GL's worth.

I appreciate that if you are used to DW, the GL interface and workflow can be quite confusing, but that doesn't mean that it is inferior (for appropriate work). Exactly the same problems are often experienced by people migrating from DW to GL.

I'm not going to go through your whole review, but at a cursory glance.........

1. Perhaps this is a workflow thing, but I define the colour palette at the design stage (to be signed off by the client), before actually starting the build. The colour palette that I choose is all available "directly" in the CSS editor.

2. The CSS editor can be accessed by one click on the top right icon of ANY open page.

3. I use Safari, and the CSS look/feel are fairly consistent with how they appear in GoLive. This is not true of IE, but that's the difference in web browsers rather than bad CSS handling in GL.

4. I usually define text size as pixels in CSS, and this has NO affect on the measurements of tables, etc., for which i often use percentage.

5. Remove colour is referred to as "unchanged", and seems to work ok for me.

6. The CSS editor isn't a 50/50 split as you have described it. The right pain is a fixed size and the left pain resizes, probably to accommodate longer descriptions.

7. etc., etc.

Cheers guy, I hope that helps ;)
 
If you're new to web design, I'd recommend starting with Nvu (from Mozilla) and then start looking at DreamWeaver/GoLive once you have a better idea of what you're doing. I've used Nvu for years, and I always recommend it to newbies, because of it's power and ease of use, and the fact that it is free. :) You can get it at www.nvu.com

I would steer you away from DreamWeaver. I have DreamWeaver MX, and it's really quite awful. Very very powerful, but rather unpredictable and very unstable. I can't comment from experience on GoLive's advantages, but from what I've heard from Mac-using colleages, it's much more Mac-friendly and intuitive than DreamWeaver.

Furthermore, Macromedia customer support ticked me off so bad that I will not be doing business with them for a very, very long time. Long story short: I found a bug -- confirmed by other users -- that brought a project to a screeching halt; I absolutely could not get around this bug, and I absolutely had to get this function done. Macromedia refused to even comment on it, even when I explained that I was following manual directions exactly and this bug was even acknowledged by other users and Macromedia associates. That was, unless I paid $49 first. I decided, forget it, I'll learn the PHP code myself.

That said, DreamWeaver is good if you are already well acquainted with HTML and server scripting code. I would not recommend it to a beginner, however.
 
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