Danny's Design

To get your hands on a trial of the new Adobe Dreamweaver, you will need to sign up with adobe (free) and then proceed with the download and installation process. A link to the new CS4 Dreamweaver trial is available here - Adobe Dreamweaver Trial.

This is a resource of links to acquire free templates for use with Adobe Dreamweaver. You may be able to get them via direct download or a torrent. In order to get the package of templates that are in the torrents you will need specific software. BitTorrent or Vuze both work well for this purpose.

Template (Direct Download) Links

Open Source Web Design
Open Web Design
Open Designs
Open Source Templates
Myhedspace
GetFreeWebDesigns
Themebot

Template Packs (Torrent Download) Links

78 Amazing Website Ready Templates
Top 100 CSS Website Templates of 2008
95 Website Ready Templates
Premium Professional Website Templates

The CS3 release of Dreamweaver is very first release of the product since adobe's takeover of the program which was originally from Macromedia.

The features that make the CS3 version of Dreamweaver better and more efficient than that of the previous releases include spry framework for ajax, spry widgets, spry effects, better photoshop CS3 integration, browser compatibility check, adobe CSS advisor, better handling of CSS Layouts, easier to manage CSS, adobe device central, adobe bridge CS3.

So not only does this release work more effienciently, it even looks like and feels like adobe's photoshop program and provides an easy way for the two to work in conjuction with each other. This important especially if you are looking to be developing images, backgrounds, or what have you alongside your html and css work.

Although if you are going to use these two together - 1 GB of ram is suggested. Dreamweaver CS3 is heavy enough on the 512 mb of ram minimum to start with.

Basic Statistics

• Minimum requirements

2 Ghz processor, 512mb ram, 1 GB free space, and a video card able to support 1024x768

• Formats supported

HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript, Ajax, PHP, Adobe ColdFusion, ASP, ASP.NET, JSP

In terms of WYSIWYG editors, probably the main three that are used are Dreamweaver, Kompozer and Nvu. I decided to include Nvu in the review because there is still a "stable" version of it that some people are still using. So if you are wondering which is the best of the three in terms of ease of use, features, price, and overall quality, here are my 2 cents.

Let's start with Nvu - it's free, and its basic. The features include a variety of languages to work in, a simple, yet effective site manager, and the tools necessary to legitimize a website. I've used this program on windows XP, Vista and on Ubuntu and I have to say that it is one of the most buggy programs I have ever used, although on Linux the program does seem to run better. So if you can get past the bugs and the crashes that it causes you will be able to create a website - for free! But there are a good deal of reasons why I believe that if you are going to be a serious web designer, but the bottom line is that if you are a beginner then you might not be html or css savvy enough to deal with the little annoyances that you might encounter due to the program's limited-ness. But hey you could always just pop a template in there and play around with it... it is free.

Kompozer is built on the program Nvu, so there are a lot of similarities. And honestly (at least for me) a lot of the same bugs (also tested on xp,vista, and ubuntu). Every once in a while it crashes and I will have to redo the last few changes I made. But it is a step up from Nvu. Did I mention it was also free?

Dreamweaver - expensive, but it is the program leading the web design industry. I own the CS4 version and I have tinkered with the CS3 version and I must say that the CS4 version is faster, more visually appealing and brings all the goods from CS3 (plus a couple new ones), and it seems more stable than the CS3 make. Essentially it's the best WYSIWYG editor out there, but the problem is that it is a hefty $200+ dollars.

To conclude I would have to say that if you have the dough to spend on dreamweaver and you want to be a serious web designer, go for it, its worth it. But if you only plan on making a basic web page and you don't want to break the bank I suggest signing up with godaddy and using a template. But if you want to learn html and css - play around with Kompozer or Nvu (whichever doesn't crash on your computer) and get acquainted.

My web design experience comes from me fiddling around on the computer until I made my first website... Which I am still trying to push for greatness. But while making it I learned a great deal of information about web design and how to do it cheap. In the upcoming posts I will share the knowledge that I have gained along with great resources to help not only beginners in their web developing endeavors but also those who are more html, xhtml, xml, css savy. Cheers.